KARMA COLA

MICK BROWN'S THE NIRVANA EXPRESSIS A REVEALING ROMP THROUGH THE WEST'S SEARCH FOR SALVATION AS IT GOES SOUTH

- Bill Aitken

THE NIRVANA EXPRESS How the Search for Enlightenment Went West By Mick Brown PENGUIN VINTAGE

Crazy but wonderful, this superbly written and often hilarious account of how the West sought enlightenment from the East—enabling the East to cash in on the gullibility of Uncle Sam—tracks how from inspired literary beginnings, the quest for wisdom was sidetracked by what the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg called “professional lunatic saints”.

Edwin Arnold’s epic poem, The Light of Asia, extolled the nobility of the Buddha’s life, while Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India through Ramana Maharshi demonstrated to the sad Saxon soul the lineaments of divine immanence. Thereafter, the graph of spiritual understanding, as this account of crazy but captivating holy personages shows, would shoot up in purple promise only to nosedive in a series of delusionary activities culminating in guns rather than roses.

The downward spiral was intimated in the first question a Harvard psychedelic "acid evangelist" was asked on arriving at a Himalayan ashram. Was he rich and, if so, would he buy them a Land Rover? As the exemplar of this "peace and not war" Flower Power era with its cash-on-delivery instant nirvana, the "Giggling Guru" of the Beatles could only teach them the siddhi of "levitating like frogs" when what they were lending their brand to was the expectation of eternal life. The "Oceanic" last guru outdoing all his predecessors in "letting it all hang out" proved adventurous far beyond the austerities normally associated with his Jain background: rubber gloves were supplied for free sex.