Island (27 page)

“Can you spot them in advance?” Will asked. “And if so, what’s the point of spotting them?”

“We
can
spot them,” Mr. Menon answered. “And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in
your
part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty percent
that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.”

“Dangerous?”

“Because these people are the propagandist’s predestined victims. In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained
not
to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to reorganize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”

“Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?”

“Precisely,” said Mr. Menon. “And that’s why
our
potential somnambulists don’t constitute a danger.”

“Then why do you go to the trouble of spotting them in advance?”

“Because, if it’s properly used, their gift is so valuable.”

“For Destiny Control?” Will questioned, remembering those therapeutic swans and all the things that Susila had said about pressing one’s own buttons.

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Destiny Control doesn’t call for anything more than a light trance. Practically everybody’s capable of that. The potential somnambulists are the twenty percent who can go into very deep trance. And it’s in very deep trance—and only in very deep trance—that a person can be taught how to distort time.”

“Can
you
distort time?” Will enquired.

Mr. Menon shook his head. “Unfortunately I could never go deep enough. Everything I know had to be learned the long, slow way. Mrs. Narayan was more fortunate. Being one of the privileged twenty percent, she could take all kinds of educational short cuts that were completely closed to the rest of us.”

“What sort of short cuts?” Will asked, turning to the Principal.

“Short cuts to memorizing,” she answered, “short cuts to calculating and thinking and problem solving. One starts by learning how to experience twenty seconds as ten minutes, a minute as half an hour. In deep trance it’s really very easy. You listen to the teacher’s suggestions and you sit there quietly for a long, long time. Two full hours—you’d be ready to take your oath on it. When you’ve been brought back, you look at your watch. Your experience of two hours was telescoped into exactly four minutes of clock time.”

“How?”

“Nobody knows how,” said Mr. Menon. “But all those anecdotes about drowning men seeing the whole of their life unfolding before them in a few seconds are substantially true. The mind and the nervous system—or rather some minds and some nervous systems—happen to be capable of this curious feat; that’s all that anybody knows. We discovered the fact about sixty years ago, and since then we’ve been exploiting it. Exploiting it, among other things, for educational purposes.”

“For example,” Mrs. Narayan resumed, “here’s a mathematical problem. In your normal state it might take you the best part of half an hour to solve. But now you distort time to the point where one minute is subjectively the equivalent of thirty minutes. Then you set to work on your problem. Thirty subjective minutes later it’s solved. But thirty subjective minutes are one clock minute. Without the least sense of rush or strain you’ve been working as fast as one of those extraordinary calculating boys, who turn up from time to time. Future geniuses like Ampére and Gauss, or future idiots like Dase—but all of them,
by some built-in trick of time distortion, capable of getting through an hour’s hard work in a couple of minutes—sometimes in a matter of seconds. I’m only an average student; but I could go into deep trance, which meant that I could be taught how to telescope my time into a thirtieth of its normal span. Result: I was able to cover far more intellectual ground than I could possibly have covered if I’d had to do all my learning in the ordinary way. You can imagine what happens when somebody with a genius IQ is also capable of time distortion. The results are fantastic!”

“Unfortunately,” said Mr. Menon, “they’re not very common. In the last two generations we’ve had precisely two time distorters of real genius, and only five or six runners-up. But what Pala owes to those few is incalculable. So it’s no wonder that we keep a sharp lookout for potential somnambulists!”

“Well, you certainly ask plenty of searching questions about your little pupils,” Will concluded after a brief silence. “What do you do when you’ve found the answers?”

“We start educating accordingly,” said Mr. Menon. “For example, we ask questions about every child’s physique and temperament. When we have the answers, we sort out all the shyest, tensest, most overresponsive and introverted children, and assemble them in a single group. Then, little by little, the group is enlarged. First a few children with tendencies towards indiscriminate sociability are introduced. Then one or two little muscle men and muscle women—children with tendencies towards aggressiveness and love of power. It’s the best method, we’ve found, for getting little boys and girls at the three polar extremes to understand and tolerate one another. After a few months of carefully controlled mixing, they’re ready to admit that people with a different kind of hereditary makeup have just as good a right to exist as they have.”

“And the principle,” said Mrs. Narayan, “is explicitly taught as well as progressively applied. In the lower forms we do the
teaching in terms of analogies with familiar animals. Cats like to be by themselves. Sheep like being together. Martens are fierce and can’t be tamed. Guinea pigs are gentle and friendly. Are you a cat person or a sheep person, a guinea-pig person or a marten person? Talk about it in animal parables, and even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness.”

“And later on,” said Mr. Menon, “when they come to read the
Gita
, we tell them about the link between constitution and religion. Sheep people and guinea-pig people love ritual and public ceremonies and revivalistic emotion; their temperamental preferences can be directed into the Way of Devotion. Cat people like to be alone, and their private broodings can become the Way of Self-Knowledge. Marten people want to
do
things, and the problem is how to transform their driving aggressiveness into the Way of Disinterested Action.”

“And the way to the Way of Disinterested Action is what I was looking at yesterday,” said Will. “The way that leads through woodchopping and rock climbing—is that it?”

“Woodchopping and rock climbing,” said Mr. Menon, “are special cases. Let’s generalize and say that the way to
all
the Ways leads through the redirection of power.”

“What’s that?”

“The principle is very simple. You take the power generated by fear or envy or too much noradrenalin, or else by some built-in urge that happens, at the moment, to be out of place—you take it and, instead of using it to do something unpleasant to someone else, instead of repressing it and so doing something unpleasant to yourself, you consciously direct it along a channel where it can do something useful, or, if not useful, at least harmless.”

“Here’s a simple case,” said the Principal. “An angry or frustrated child has worked up enough power for a burst of crying, or bad language, or a fight. If the power generated is sufficient
for any of those things, it’s sufficient for running, or dancing, more than sufficient for five deep breaths. I’ll show you some dancing later on. For the moment, let’s confine ourselves to breathing. Any irritated person who takes five deep breaths releases a lot of tension and so makes it easier for himself to behave rationally. So we teach our children all kinds of breathing games, to be played whenever they’re angry or upset. Some of the games are competitive. Which of two antagonists can inhale most deeply and say ‘
OM
’ on the outgoing breath for the longest time? It’s a duel that ends, almost without fail, in reconciliation. But of course there are many occasions when competitive breathing is out of place. So here’s a little game that an exasperated child can play on his own, a game that’s based on the local folklore. Every Palanese child has been brought up on Buddhist legends, and in most of these pious fairy stories somebody has a vision of a celestial being. A Bodhisattva, say, in an explosion of lights, jewels and rainbows. And along with the glorious vision there’s always an equally glorious olfaction; the fireworks are accompanied by an unutterably delicious perfume. Well, we take these traditional phantasies—which are all based, needless to say, on actual visionary experiences of the kind induced by fasting, sensory deprivation or mushrooms—and we set them to work. Violent feelings, we tell the children, are like earthquakes. They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature. You get cross, something inside of you cracks and, through the crack, out comes a whiff of the heavenly smell of enlightenment. Like champak, like ylang-ylang, like gardenias—only infinitely more wonderful. So don’t miss this heavenliness that you’ve accidentally released. It’s there every time you get cross. Inhale it, breathe it in, fill your lungs with it. Again and again.”

“And they actually do it?”

“After a few weeks of teaching, most of them do it as a mat
ter of course. And, what’s more, a lot of them really smell that perfume. The old repressive ‘Thou shalt not’ has been translated into a new expressive and rewarding ‘Thou shalt.’ Potentially harmful power has been redirected into channels where it’s not merely harmless, but may actually do some good. And meanwhile, of course, we’ve been giving the children systematic and carefully graduated training in perception and the proper use of language. They’re taught to pay attention to what they see and hear, and at the same time they’re asked to notice how their feelings and desires affect what they experience of the outer world, and how their language habits affect not only their feelings and desires but even their sensations. What my ears and my eyes record is one thing; what the words I use and the mood I’m in and the purposes I’m pursuing allow me to perceive, make sense of and act upon is something quite different. So you see it’s all brought together into a single educational process. What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining, a training in applied physiology and psychology, a training in practical ethics and practical religion, a training in the proper use of language, and a training in self-knowledge. In a word, a training of the whole mind-body in all its aspects.”

“What’s the relevance,” Will asked, “of all this elaborate training of the mind-body to formal education? Does it help a child to do sums, or write grammatically, or understand elementary physics?”

“It helps a lot,” said Mr. Menon. “A trained mind-body learns more quickly and more thoroughly than an untrained one. It’s also more capable of relating facts to ideas, and both of them to its own ongoing life.” Suddenly and surprisingly—for that long melancholy face gave one the impression of being incompatible with any expression of mirth more emphatic than a rather weary smile—he broke into a loud long peal of laughter.

“What’s the joke?”

“I was thinking of two people I met last time I was in En
gland. At Cambridge. One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and the living.”

“And your system, I take it, doesn’t produce that kind of academic monster?”

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Until I went to Europe, I’d never seen anything of the kind. They’re grotesquely funny,” he added. “But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!”

“Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that’s the price we pay for specialization.”

“For specialization,” Mr. Menon agreed, “but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won’t do much harm. But you people don’t educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don’t let’s be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don’t humanize. They’re simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude. Hence all those pathetic and repulsive creatures that so astonished me on my first trip abroad.”

“What about formal education?” Will now asked. “What
about indispensable information and the necessary intellectual skills? Do you teach the way we do?”

“We teach the way you’re probably going to teach in another ten or fifteen years. Take mathematics, for example. Historically mathematics began with the elaboration of useful tricks, soared up into metaphysics and finally explained itself in terms of structure and logical transformations. In our schools we reverse the historical process. We begin with structure and logic; then, skipping the metaphysics, we go on from general principles to particular applications.”