What is enlightenment?
Steve And The Mosquito
Fever or Mystical Experience?
Steve told me he became enlightened when a mosquito landed on his arm one day
He understood that the mosquito was the Buddha and that his blood was wisdom nectar. In connecting the two, his mental concepts dropped away, and he realised the meaning of the Buddhist teaching.
I never asked him for the information — it’s not something Buddhists are encouraged to do. We are taught to hide spiritual experiences, and Steve mainly did. I never heard him share the experience with anyone else, not even his parents.
I was fucking sick, and the constant fever, shitting and spewing took their toll. I was thin and weak with bloodshot eyes, but I was determined to get out of my bedroom — away from the thin mat on the hard floor and the stench of curry and garbage from the street below.
Steve brought me to this beautiful hill — first in a taxi — steel death trap bursting with Hindi music and the stench of sickly incense — then by foot with one arm around me.
It was just before dawn, and rainbows were all around me in circular patterns. I didn’t know if it was a mystical experience or the fever. Was I tripping or dying? It didn’t matter anymore.
Steve stripped naked and wrapped himself up in an orange shawl. Then he began to dance and chant.
I hated Steve at first. I met him at a party and thought he was a pretentious dick
He asked me to meet for coffee the next day, and I wanted to tell him to get fucked. But Nepal is the kind of place where you go with the flow, and magical things happen. We ended up talking for a whole day at a coffee shop and taking a couple of walks through the stinking streets of Kathmandu.
On one of the walks, we stopped at a carport where a fly-infested buffalo carcass was on a wooden table out the front.
The dead buffalo was covered in a wet cloth from a bucket, and the edges were drying out in the sun. A man came out of the carport and gave us a big smile while his family sat inside the carport, laughing and smiling and waving at us. Steve spoke to him in Nepali and the man sliced off two bags of buffalo meat.
As we walked away, Steve told me that the man lived with his parents, his wife, six children and two grandchildren in the carport.
In the morning, the father and his son go out to the hills and slaughter a buffalo. They make their days trade and then pull the buffalo on its table back into the carport where they all sleep, eat next to the corpse, and shit into a bucket into the corner. The next day, they wake up and do the same thing.
Steve handed me a bag of buffalo meat, and we walked the streets feeding dogs.
By the time our bags were empty, we had about a hundred dogs following us round like we were deranged pied pipers.
A friend told me later that Steve had been recognised as a reincarnation of a famous teacher when he was young but refused the title and shunned any association with the monastic institute involved.
She said that the Tibetans referred to him as Rinpoche, and he still gave them informal teachings here and there to make them happy. But mostly, he didn’t like people to know about the matter.
He never mentioned it to me once — even to this day.
Now he was on the top of this hill, and the sun was coming up. Its perfect orange shimmer matched the shawl that Steve wore while dancing around and chanting. I noticed that he no longer appeared as the pale Western guy I knew but was distinctly Indian looking with a thin black moustache and long black hair.
Once again, I didn’t know if it was the fever or a mystical experience, but as he danced, I began to feel strong again, and by the time the sun came up, my fever had broken.
Steve came and sat cross-legged in front of me.
His face was that of the Indian man. He told me that now I was seeing him with my heart, rather than my head.
He beckoned me to walk through the door of his heart.
I told him it wasn’t possible and he asked me why not? I couldn’t answer.
There was no physical door, but I felt what he meant. No doubt, the door was open, but I couldn’t enter.
Fear held me back.
We walked back down the hill and had breakfast at the coffee shop. Steve always ordered the hottest curry, even at breakfast. The shop owner would point at Steve saying, ‘Bhutanese, Bhutanese’ and laughing like a maniac.
Steve finally went home to America since he wanted to study theatre there.
After he left, I returned to our coffee shop. It was cold and crisp, but a mosquito was floating around. It stopped on the edge of my coffee cup for a while, then glided up and landed its tiny legs on my arm. I watched as it slid its perfect, microscopic feeder into my flesh and nourished its body with the mysterious red juice. Finally, it stretched out its wings with a fat red belly and took off into the cool air.
I watched it float away, and, at that moment, I never had an ounce of mystical experience — not a drop of spiritual realisation. Nothing was even slightly different from how it had always been — the cool air, the smell of coffee, a slight itch on the arm, and life everywhere, all around.
So much life.
