To do this in the old days, we had to embark on a long and hazardous journey to the foothills of the Himalayas to be taught by a serene and transcendental yogi. Today, the yogis are all around us and I had no difficulty in finding a venerable sage who willingly agreed to initiate me into the mystic art of meditation.
The gentleman in question was on his way from Amritsar to Los Angeles but was able to devote a considerable amount of time trying to teach me the various positions of the body that are most conducive to complete transcendence. He gave up, however, when he discovered my leg bones and sinews were about as inflexible as the Great Wall of China and that standing on my head made me dizzy. So he told me to just lie in bed as comfortably as possible and to begin consciously relaxing all my muscles, from the extremities of my toes to my eyelids, and to dismiss every thought that came to my mind until it was a complete blank.
“What will happen then?” I asked.
“You will release your inner self and enable it to commune with higher entities in the realm of the beyond,” was his answer.
He had to catch the TWA flight out of Athens on the following morning so I was left to my own resources in trying to achieve spiritual exaltation. When on the first two nights I tried relaxing my muscles I found 1 fell asleep after getting as far as my pectorals. On the third night, I had no difficulty in making my mind a blank—a normal condition, particularly when I put a sheet of paper in my typewriter and try to write an article which is already three days overdue. But nothing more happened. My inner self refused to emerge.
On the fourth night, however, 1 became conscious of a whining sound just above my head. It was very insistent and I felt myself strongly attracted to it. The next thing I knew I was in telepathic communication with an extremely curvaceous and nubile female mosquito.
“Hiya,” she said, “just let me take a bite out of this guy here and then we can go places together.” The accompanying wink from her multi-faceted left eye was very seductive indeed.
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “If you think I’m a male mosquito, you’ve got a big surprise coming. I’m the guy you’re planning to dine off.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she said with a pout of her slender proboscis. “I can’t see you in the dark but I can sense you near me and I have the feeling that you are an extremely handsome, hairy-chested, long-limbed and very attractive male.”
“That I may be,” I admitted, blushing a little at the compliments, “but I am definitely not a mosquito.”
“Then why are you talking to me if you’re not a Culex pipiens? I can’t understand it,” she said with some irritation.
I can’t understand it either, I thought to myself. My inner self is supposed to be communing with higher entities in the realm of the beyond and here I am talking to a bloody dipteron.
“Obviously, we’ve got our telepathic signals crossed,” I said to her, explaining about my Indian friend. “My consciousness is communicating with your consciousness, but I am not a Culex pipiens. I am the person on the bed below you who was on your dinner menu a minute ago.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, disappointedly. “So you’re a hated human after all. It’s such a pity. I was so looking forward to a bit of post-prandial hanky-panky and then going off to lay my eggs in that old yoghurt dish that’s half-filled with rain-water at the bottom of your garden.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I said, “but why do you hate humans?”
“Are you kidding?” she cried, “you with your insecticide sprays, your Katol coils, your Vape-Mats, your Off lotions and all the other paraphernalia at your command to protect your precious skins, to kill us, or prevent us from drawing a few tiny drops of blood that you won’t miss anyway? Can you blame ns for hating you?”
“Now, now,” I said, “you know perfectly well that mosquito bites are most irritating to us humans. They make us break out in bumps and itch and scratch and, what’s more, we can catch malaria and yellow fever from some of your kind.”
“I still think that’s no reason why we should be persecuted so viciously,” she snorted. “And you, my fine friend, are one of the more vicious ones. Oh, yes, I recognize you now. I’ve seen you put the light on in the middle of the night, spotting some of my pals resting quietly on the wall above your head, and squashing them with the palm of your hand with an expression of fiendish relish on your ugly face.”
“I thought you said I looked handsome,” I murmured in protest.
“That’s because I thought you were another mosquito. Now I know you’re just another murderous human, everything about you fills me with revulsion. Anyway, didn’t your Indian friend tell you that all life is precious and that if you take a life you will accumulate karma and have to pay it off in this, or another life? If you go on killing mosquitos at the rate you are, you’ll be so chock-a-block with karma you’ll never be able to pay it off in a thousand lives!”
“I didn’t get that far in my instruction,” I mumbled. “But I see what you mean. Is it all right if I use a mosquito net?”
Before I could get a reply, I felt my consciousness of the Culex’smindbegin to fade but I could still hear the high-pitched whine. Automatically, I put the light on and waited for the mosquito to settle on the wall. When it did, I brought my flattened palm down on it with the expertise born of many years of manual mosquito-swatting. Then the recollection of my trance state came back to me and I realized, to my horror, what a terrible thing I had done I had unthinkingly killed my chatty little Culex who would never communicate with me again. I was overcome with grief and the worst thing about it was that I had to suffer alone. There was nobody I could turn to for consolation.
In the morning, I went to the bottom of the garden, found the yoghurt dish which was almost dry, and reverently filled it with water. It was the least I could do. Then I went out and bought a mosquito net.
