I am writing from my meditation hermitage in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I’ve never come in winter before. It’s blazing cold. I’ll be here longer than I’ve ever stayed. And I’ve never had to regulate the wood burning stove that dominates the downstairs. Even worse, I had the foolish idea that I should come here to write a book, but I’m scared that I will have nothing to say and that I will fail—miserably, embarrassingly, fail. So much for being the noble ascetic writer alone in his garret!
If I tell the real truth, as I hereby vow to do throughout this book, just now I’m anxious. I am thinking about a comfortable bed and a heating system that turns itself on and off and wondering when I can leave without losing face. And I think it might snow.
Anxiety like this sneaks in between thoughts—a ghostly and bitter sinking of the solar plexus. It is sure of itself in a way I am not. It knows that I cannot, that even to try will end in shame, and that I was a fool even to come. “You cannot, you cannot,” it repeats. I am afraid.
So I lean into this sinking dread. And as I do, I sense something else here: an openness, a spaciousness. In a way I cannot say, this “something else” is larger than the fearfulness. It is wide, translucent, empty, yet almost a something. It is strange and appealing, this whatever-it-is just below my fears, this steadiness. It is kindly, comforting, like a billowing blanket on a tired evening, a gentle velvet warmth in forearms and calves, an effortless waking softness that stretches through my skin, beyond my body, across the room and out the walls into the dusky hillsides in the distance.
And so I sit, this vast empty me beneath this fearful me, much as I have done for nearly 40 years. This listening, holding, witnessing, vast me is here. It is who or perhaps what I am. And yet this other me, this worried, scared, laughing me, is also here, astonishingly, miraculously unhealed.
I am closed and afraid. And I am as vast as the colorless air.
I don’t know if I am a human being held in the arms of an endlessness, or a vastness having human fears.
Being both these things at once is the peculiar miracle of my life, and of many lives of people on “the path.” Learning to live them both, and well, is the challenge.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When we took up meditation in the early seventies, we all were going to gain enlightenment. It would be life-shattering, the end of all neurosis, clean. It was to be the end of all suffering, the revolution of the soul. Enlightenment will, we heard,
… put an end to all suffering; filling the heart with happiness brings perfect tranquility to the mind.1
As enlightened beings, we would not be a little happier or just more content. Such people are filled with happiness. The realized man, the illumined soul… ahhh… he will be steeped in perfect joy. All his desires would be fulfilled, all his suffering at an end.
A soul evolved to this cosmic state is eternally contented.2
When we became truly without stress, having utterly relinquished the knots and tensions that had held us in our mundane egos, we would live eternal freedom in divine consciousness.3
My guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, used to recite some of the Indian texts he had memorized in his youth. Quoting the Hindu Upanishads, for example, he assured us that,
When [the individual soul] it discovers the Atman
Full of dignity and power,
It is freed from all its suffering.4
When a man knows [the infinite], he is free: his sorrows have an end…5
I wanted that. I didn’t want to be happier, I wanted perfect happiness. I didn’t want less suffering, I wanted to be utterly free from suffering. Not fewer but all my sorrows should end. I wanted the life Maharishi described: dignified, full of power, helpful to others, deep, suffering-free.
That was the deal. We’d meditate. We’d do our yoga. We’d let go our stresses. We’d work for the TM movement. And we’d gain divine consciousness, full-on perfection, Enlightenment. My Buddhist friends were well on the way to Nirvana. My Christian friends were going to gain Heaven on Earth. And wouldn’t it all be grand?
Dr. Charles Tart, eminently sane scientist of meditation that he is, put it this way. Serious spiritual seekers like me and he himself,
[tended] to think of enlightenment as all or none. Somebody is enlightened or somebody is not enlightened.6
And because this was so, to gain enlightenment would be to become perfect.
In this all or none model of enlightened functioning… [we think] every single thing an enlightened person does must be perfect.7
Enlightened gurus like Maharishi, Swami Muktananda, Rajneesh or a Zen Roshi like Eido Roshi carried a presence unlike anything most of us westerners had ever encountered. They seemed like god-men. So it was disconcerting to witness, over the years, their feet turning more into clay than we expected: Rolls Royces, sexual dalliances, strange money management, faked miracles, the full catastrophe.
One purportedly realized soul led his followers to stage a bloody gas attack on a Tokyo subway station.
No, enlightenment turned out to be far more ambiguous than the single summum bonum, the supreme good, for which I and so many others had been longing.
So here I sit, in just that ambiguity, steeped permanently in some approximation of the openness to which enlightenment points, yet at the same time anxious about the loneliness and the cold and whether I’ll have anything worthwhile to say. Whatever this strange both/and life is, it is far more ambiguous than any all or none, or indeed anything I could ever have imagined. I am way too much beast to be a god-man and far too much god to be beast.
This strange state of both/and affairs began January 4, 1972, in the Hotel Karina, Mallorca, Spain, at 4:00 in the afternoon. That was the time when the vastness that has no beginning began.
Before that afternoon, I had only known this world: things, thoughts, people, hopes, dreads, loves and losses. After it … well I’m getting ahead of myself.
Mostly being in this world meant being anxious: “generalized anxiety disorder,” one doctor called it. “Post adolescent anxiety identity diffusion,” said another. To me it was just life.
Anxiety had been with me since before I can remember, which is only about 11. I doubt I even knew the word “anxiety” at eleven. Certainly I didn’t know that I was in it, any more than a fish can know it’s in water. But it was the ocean in which I swam, every minute, every day.
As I was reasonably successful in high school, it remained in the background. But when I got to the University of Chicago (well-dubbed, “where fun goes to die”) I was, for the first time in my life, in a huge class of kids, all of whom were, like me, presidents of their classes and leads in their high school musicals. It’s hard to prop yourself up when you’re nobody special.
By midway through my second term, I was spiraling into what I can only describe as psychological collapse. The worst part of serious depression is that you can’t imagine that it ever was or will be different. It gets harder and harder to hold up your head, to get to class or even to smile, and your life slows into some ever more languorous ennui. By the end of my second term I was pretty much plastered to an orange naugahyde chair in the dorm’s windowless TV room, living on vending machine ice cream sandwiches and watching Star Trek reruns till three in the morning.
Towards the end of that first year, I was walking back from the laundry room through the dormitory’s moldy basement tunnel. I suddenly heard whispering voices around me. I looked around, but all I saw were dusty corners and peeling overhead pipes. Though I was alone, I heard more and more voices, all at once. Something about being a fraud, about not being who I claimed I was. Ten, twenty, eventually maybe a hundred voices, all unintelligible, all accusing. I’ve never been so terrified. Lasted about 10 minutes.
About two weeks later the whispers came again. Same laundry room, same basement passageway. Hundreds of voices, all at once this time, terrifying, accusatory, cacophonic.
When they came a third time, this time while I was walking across the quad in a cold late evening’s mist, I was afraid I was actually losing my mind. (I was probably right.) So I made my way to the school’s mental health clinic, where they assigned me to Myra Leifer, a short Israeli woman. Myra was cute as hell and seemed to genuinely care. Although the whispers came back one only more time, the anxious churning in my belly never abated.
By my third year the churning in my gut had become nearly unbearable. Some unfathomable despondency had taken over my life, as if I was disjunct, living somebody else’s life.
The worst of it came on March 15 of my third year. Chicago dyes the Chicago River green for St. Patrick’s day, and I found myself sitting on the edge of a rusty I-beam on one of its bridges, staring dizzily down into the green slime below, wondering what it would feel like to hit the water from such a height and whether I would be conscious enough for my swimmer’s instincts to take over. No whispering voices this time. No strong emotions. Just curious what it would be like to drown.
I sat on that I-beam for a very long time. Why I didn’t jump I don’t actually know. But something, some shred of hope or determination or cowardice or life instinct led me to climb down from that beam.
This is something I’m grateful for but will never understand. Even at my most lethargic, something in me just never gave up. (This wasn’t true for all of us, by the way. During my third year one of the four of us depressives that sat together in front of the TV till three in the morning actually killed himself.) I have no idea what it was in me that led me to climb off that I-beam and not him.
It was that life instinct, I suppose, that led me into therapy with Myra, to try Zen, to enroll in yoga class and to study a little psychology. None of it seemed to help back then, not really. But that drive to fix whatever the hell was wrong with me, the passion to find a life worth living, to keep going in the face of discouragement and pain, is probably what’s kept me going. It’s also no doubt what’s gotten me to this place, to this book and to the ambiguous spaciousness I feel just now. Despite my anxious and depressive solar plexus that would not abate for 20 years, I never stopped trying.
I didn’t have words for it at the time, but during the fall of my senior year I had my first spiritual experience. I used to race my cream colored MGB sports car on back roads outside of Chicago in “motocross” races. One Sunday I was careening at some ungodly speed when all of a sudden, everything else in my life seemed to drop away. All my anxieties, all my thoughts and feelings, even the loneliness just disappeared. For a few moments it was just me, the steering wheel, the hood, and the road. That was probably my first moment of real peace, and at 87 miles an hour no less. And some sort of beacon, as it turned out.
I made it through college by 1969. A college roommate had tried Transcendental Meditation (TM™) and claimed it was giving him some peace of mind. So when I got dumped by one last girlfriend, Lisa, I hitchhiked to Boston to learn it. Hope is a powerful magnet and nothing else was calling me.
I soon found myself standing in my stocking feet in a sweetly incensed room next to one Dan Raney, my TM “initiator,” holding an orange I’d found in my sister’s fridge and the wilted flowers I had stolen from someone’s apartment flowerbox, listening to him chant a strange little song to the gaudy print of a half naked guru on his little altar. He was singing the Sanskrit song not to me but for me, I felt. The moment felt important, as if this neatly dressed fellow was chanting new possibility.
When he finished we bowed. Then he instructed me to repeat a mantra, a one syllable Sanskrit word, verbally then mentally. Within a few minutes I heard inside what seemed like ten, twenty, eventually perhaps a hundred monks whispering this meaningless syllable right alongside my own mental repetitions, as if they were buttressing my own reedy voice with their gravelly resonance. This was almost as terrifying as those whispers a few years before. But these were singing in unison, and were kindlier, more compassionate and not at all angry. There was something here, I felt: a power, a resonance of love I couldn’t have found on my own.
Every time I meditated that week I heard them, with a combination of enchantment, fascination and dread. I’d come out of every meditation drenched. As the week ended though, they just vanished. I’ve never heard them since. I still don’t know who they were or what unclaimed corner of my psyche they’d come from or what they were doing. But perhaps they’d accomplished what they’d come for. Whatever was going on though, those first meditations were certainly intriguing enough to keep me going twice a day, every day.
Within a few months I began to notice odd little effects. My skin would twitch, like a horse might shoo off a fly, more often in meditation than out. I jiggled my legs a little less, I thought, both inside and outside of meditation. My breathing seemed to be slowing down a bit.
About three weeks into meditating, I got summarily canned from an auto mechanic’s job. I was just too depressive, I suspect, too low energy. I went home and turned on a Saturday football game (something I never do). I had been canned before, but this time, for no obvious reason, I began to cry. In all my adult years, I had wanted to cry, needed desperately to cry. But even with Myra Leifer I had been way too blocked up. But that day, sitting in front of that ridiculous football game, I just wept. I cried, unable sometimes to catch my breath, over the job I couldn’t keep. I bawled for all the years and for all the sadness I’d carried without knowing why. I wept for I didn’t know what. I’d stop, grab a Kleenex, and then crank up again. I sobbed and stopped, sobbed and stopped for something like an hour and a half.
I felt more cleaned out that evening than I could ever remember. This meditation stuff seemed to be doing something!
About two months later, I signed up for my first weekend meditation retreat. Not much seemed to be happening during the weekend, except a lot of time with our eyes closed. But driving home was amazing! The fields and scrub oak barrens seemed welcoming somehow, gracious. It was as if the cranberry bogs and country roads were smiling. For an hour I felt, well, actually happy!
I was hooked. Boring, interesting, tired, energetic or deep, my meditations became the bookends of my daily routine. Like clockwork, twice a day, morning and evening. Haven’t missed a day since (egad! 42 years!).
I developed my first real friendships that year. Phil Goldberg, a lanky, funny “Hin-Jew” as he called himself, invited me to play some jazz with him. (We were terrible). I enjoyed my roommate Jussi and his two unbelievably big wolf hounds.
I got (and kept) a job at Strawberry Records, and enjoyed chatting people up about Beethoven and Renaissance madrigals. I got involved there with gorgeous, alto voiced Carol, whose cheeks were hiker-rosy and whose tie dyed skirts swirled when she walked. We’d have long heartfelt talks on breaks from the record shop. I loved to tell her over dinner of my meditation moments and hear of her spiritual insights on her woodsy walks.
But alas, within two days of one of our heart to hearts, I’d need to see her again and feel loved. She must have felt utterly smothered though. Driving her away took about six months this time, which was my longest to date. That I supposed, was progress.
So yeah, there was progress in those early days. Within two years of learning TM, I had a few friends, a fairly substantial relationship, a modest job and a steady spiritual path. I’m still not sure just why my life was beginning to take shape, but it was. Growing up perhaps? Living on my own? The structure of twice daily meditations and the community that came with it? But I’d have to say, there’s something about routinely dipping your life into the peculiar dye of inward quiescence, sensing a whole new level of reality there, a whole new possibility for being, that seemed to be helping. You’re touching the real in those moments, even if only vaguely, and it matters.
Nonetheless, those old anxieties never lifted, not even for an hour. I still carried that just-this-side-of-weepy feeling. I was still terribly lonely, even when surrounded by crowds of meditators. I was still unsure of who I was, still needy, and still chasing away every woman I’d ever loved. And my churning, belly drooping yet nameless dreads were still with me, constantly.
It was in this discouraged yet hopeful state of soul that I flew to a “TM Teacher Training Course” course, October, 1971, in Mallorca Spain. Which is when it began.
I landed in Mallorca, Spain in October, 1971 and took the movement bus to the thickly carpeted Hotel Karina to begin my nine month “TM Teacher Training” course with crinkly-eyed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, our short, stringy-haired, much beloved guru.
Maharishi had a darshan, a belly-dropping presence, unlike anyone I had ever met. He could be amazingly insightful, attentive, concerned and giggly, sometimes all at once. When he walked into a room, a sandalwood hush would descend over the whole room. The walls would open out and the floor drop away. All 1500 of us (which would eventually become 2500) would stand two deep in snaking devotee lines, waiting to give him a carnation or rose as he walked in, but mostly to get a quick hit of his charisma. He’d look at us with his terrible gaze, or we’d exchange a word or two with him, and we’d walk back to our chairs in a blessed out existential daze. He was that powerful! And he seemed to know each of us better than we knew ourselves.8
The evening meetings were mostly Maharishi’s lectures. They were rambling affairs at best, long winded at worst. The bolder of us would ask about some theory of stress or about problems in meditation, and he’d answer patiently, if sometimes unintelligibly. He’d talk about how consciousness itself was the “source of thoughts.” He’d go over the Hindu theology of formed and unformed Brahman, which was described in the early Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, which were, he occasionally mentioned, some 25,000 years old. Sometimes he’d have a physics professor come up and connect the theory of quantum physics with our meditative depths. Or some psychologist would be invited to make a presentation, and Maharishi would point out parallels between the quantum vacuum state, Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, and some passage from the Vedas.
To listen to Maharishi was to listen to nature itself speak. His words and thoughts seemed to be an out-flowing of the way things really are. This little man on his flower strewn dais seemed a fire hose from the source, and we got to stand at the mike and ask it questions. We learned a system as complicated and as thorough as any theology I studied later in graduate school or Theological Seminary, but we were getting it from The Real itself.
Officially we were there to train to become teachers of meditation. And so we did, dutifully. We memorized page after page of teaching material, chanted the long Sanskrit prayer, the puja, to each other in small groups, and we practiced the strangely formal ritual movements with our new, shiny brass implements.
Mostly though we meditated. Day after day we sat, eyes closed. Six or eight hours a day, every day, for nine months. We sat alone in our hotel rooms, on floor pillows or leaning against the backboards of our beds. We sat cross legged in chairs or feet down in the Karina’s overstuffed love seats. We sat in small groups on hotel terraces and in great lecture halls, eventually 2500 strong.
Our day was divided into “rounds.” Thirty minutes of meditation, ten minutes of yoga, ten of the boring breathing exercise called pranayama, and maybe another ten to pee or lean against the porch railing, looking out to the windy Mediterranean Sea: that was one round. I generally did my rounds in my hotel room, sitting lotus style in my room’s tan love seat, or, against the wall, with legs extended over my richly carpeted floor. For three quarters of a year, seven days a week, I closed my eyes and sat.
For those who haven’t spent many hours meditating, it’s almost pointless to describe such long term meditation. I can’t tell you what others’ were like, though my sense is that mine were fairly typical. Some of my meditations were heartbeatingly active. Lots were workaday, with my mind going over to-do lists and plans as if I was at my office desk. But often meditation was like a tender caress, where increasingly slow, languorous thoughts would find their way into a roundness of warmth and softness inside like a purring feline on a warm evening’s bed. A gentle kindliness wafts into your forearms and calves, like a waking sleep, and you become very soft with yourself, fighting nothing, seeking nothing, but just letting your mind drift and be awake simply for all the vague, dreamy half-seen thoughts and felt sounds.
To meditate like this is to let go of self. It is to relinquish who you are and to let go of life’s concerns into the merest being alive. Such letting go into the smooth presence of simple being is not the kind of visible, salable skill a businessman or a violinist might develop. But it is not at all trivial. To really let go, to not try, not even a little, is its own kind of mastery. You learn how to relax over months like those, and to relinquish. You are dropping into the real and it has a quiet but transformative power. I gained the beginnings of the flexibility it takes to self-correct that year. It was the year I discovered what it was to evolve.
I am starting to feel a little more confident about being here. I’ve discovered where the kindling is hidden and where the paper. I have found that when I’m starting the fire, the door likes to be opened a little to let the fire breathe. Though there is still a chill on my neck and calves this morning, I can sense the warmth slowly expanding through the room. It is starting to feel a little like the expanse in my soul that is my reason for being here. I like the settledness I feel here.
There was a longing in the Hotel Karina. I suppose it is the same hunger that has led people to every other TM retreat and probably to every ashram ever. It’s not like we tell ourselves in so many words that enlightenment will feel like this or that, though we did speculate about it endlessly that year. The longing for salvation was more like a door we leaned on, expecting it to give way anytime. We were all on the verge of something important, like falling in love or getting into college, only better. For unlike either of them, we were on the cusp of the great mystery, and it would be permanent. It was a deep and inexpressible ache—for the perfect life, for more love, for coming alive.
Two thousand five hundred of us on that course, all “just about to fall” into enlightenment. And all looking for portents. One fellow told Maharishi that he often saw streams of colors when his eyes were closed, and then asked if he might be an incarnation of Saraswati, the goddess of art. (Maharishi’s kindly and un-cynical answer: “it is a good experience.”) My friend Tim was sure he could magically see across the room during his meditations, until someone told him that when he meditated his eyes were half open. We’d repeat rumors of folks who could see divine vibrations in the air or hear celestial music or who had fallen into some sublime state. Tales of “cosmic consciousness” and “unity consciousness” were everywhere.
To be enlightened, Maharishi had assured us, would be to live in harmony with the world around. Everything would go better, all our desires would be met. The enlightened one finds great intelligence, energy, happiness and harmony and, possessed of these, no limit to the fulfillment of desires.9
We would become more intelligent, smarter. We would be less self-centered. There would be “no limit to the fulfillment of desires.” And it would all come effortlessly.
In his translation of The Bhagavad Gita, which many of us read till it was dog eared, Maharishi described moks.a, enlightenment. In it there will be
A solid foundation for the actor, and … the maximum possible success in action with the most glorious fruits.10
We would be solid, impenetrable, unshakable. And with it we’d have the “maximum possible” success in the world. Not just some success, mind you, not just decent people, but we’d have the maximum possible success. Whatever we did or tried to do, the fruits of our efforts would be excellent, wonderful, ticker-tape “glorious.”
When one gains enlightenment, Maharishi said, quoting the ninth century Indian philosopher Shankara, when one lives with “the Atman” as their consciousness, they would be “ever blissful.” They would find, “the ultimate peace and remain absorbed in the joy which is silence.”
The ultimate peace, the peace that passes understanding, the unchanging, unshaking, immovable peace. The total end of all our anxieties and fears. “Absorbed in”, surrounded by, the joy of silence, we would live in a state of
“unmingled bliss forever….No matter what [he or she] is doing, the illumined seer … lives in joy and freedom.”11
Bliss at this level would not be ruined by all the complexities and depressions of our everyday lives. We would not be sort of blissful or sort of happy. No, to be enlightened was to be simple, joyous, free, untrammeled bliss.
The Beatle’s Paul McCartney caught the feel of our hotel in the little ditty he wrote while with Maharishi.
C’mon, Be Cosmically Conscious,
Cosmically Conscious With Me…
Such a Joy, Joy
Such a Joy, Joy
So that Means
Such a Joy
(repeat)12
Maharishi wasn’t the only guru extolling enlightenment. Buddhism for example describes a similar perfection, the fearless life of Prajna Paramita that is “without hindrances.”
The bodhisattva depends on Prajna Paramita
And the mind is no hindrance;
without any hindrance no fears exist.
Far apart from every perverted view one dwells in nirvana.13
No fears, none. No hindrances. Perfect Nirvana.
Or the Buddhist Lama Lodo:
There will be a spontaneous recognition that the mind which has been meditating on emptiness and the state of emptiness itself are one and the same.14
John Welwood saw the same thing among adepts in his Buddhist world: they believed that when they
“have major spiritual openings, they imagined that everything [will] change and that they will never be the same again.”
Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabi writes
Then the breakthrough suddenly comes, and with that [spiritual seekers] penetrate their own nature, the nature of others, the nature of sentient beings, the nature of evil passions and of enlightenment ….The great matter of their religious quest is completely and utterly resolved. There is nothing left.15
Or the Christian author of The Book of Privy Counseling,
Man’s highest perfection is union with God in consummate love, a destiny so high, so pure in itself, and so far beyond human thought that it cannot be known or imagined as it really is.16
Virtually every religion or spiritual path holds aloft a heavenly goal of some sort: enlightenment, Olympus, Elysium or paradise, the Muslim’s Jannah, Heaven to the Christian or the Jew, Buddhism’s Nirvana or the “pure land,” Hinduism’s moks.a or its svarga loka, the center of the universe way up on Mt. Meru. Even dusty, embattled Jerusalem has been a promised land. We all need a promise to keep us going when we get discouraged, I suppose, a far away “there” on which we lean like a door that’s about to open.
Like a sunflower reaching towards the sun, I aimed my life towards enlightenment. By the time I flew to Mallorca I was no longer so lost as I had been two years earlier, standing next to Dan Raney holding my little bunch of wilted flowers. But I still longed. For I had tragically little confidence, little sense for who I was or for where I was going and little stability.
Dreads that no one would want to sit with me or jealousy about Judith, my crush of the month, would alternate nearly daily with some euphoric experience or some uplift or about what we would accomplish, only to sink back into depression a day later. Halfway through the year I hung a three by five card on a string from my hotel room ceiling. On one side I wrote, “Today I am up.” On the other side, “Today I am down.” Every time I would walk in or out of my room I’d give it a little flick. Spinning it—“Up today / down today”—helped me remember at my worst that things would probably change.
No wonder I was longing for enlightenment. It was sanity. It was hope. It was my safe place. It was a way out.
This was the context.
It began about two months into the course. It wasn’t painful. No dark night of the soul, no burning or shaking. Just that without warning, and so noticeable that I opened my eyes to check them, the palms and the backs of my hands became silent.
Everywhere else I could feel something like faint “pins and needles.” Such white noise sensations had always been there, so constant that I had never noticed. But here, on the fronts and backs of both hands, something or someone had suddenly scrubbed my skin super-clean. All the white noise just stopped, utterly.
Absence is an odd sensation. It’s more a not than an is. In just that one area, front and back of both hands, I was un-busy. Where low level burbling had been, was now just skin.
By a few days later that strange lack of “noise” had extended itself halfway up my forearms. I felt for awhile as if I was wearing women’s formal gloves. By several days later the pins and needles all over my head, face and neck had been scrubbed away. After a few more days the quiet had spread itself over my shoulders and halfway down my chest.
Some otherworldly squeegee was systematically working its way downwards. Utterly silent skin above, slight pins and needles below. Silence was descending down front, sides and back all at once; this quieted layer was slowly and methodically expanding.
This had nothing to do with my ability to feel or touch, mind you. I hadn’t become numb. Where the squeegee had done its work, things still felt hard or hot or slippery. I could still hold a hand or scratch my nose. But over half my body, there was now nothing added, no white noise, no sensation beneath the sensations. Just quiet skin.
This newness was not just in meditation, mind you. Walking downstairs to the dining room, listening to Maharishi in the evening meetings, kidding around on the terrace late at night, this strange plane still divided my body into Yin and Yang: quiet silent skin above and noisy below. And with nary a hint of effort from my side to make it so. It just was the new state of my body.
After another week or so, the descending plane halted just above my ankles. I actually kept checking to see if my socks were too tight! But by about a week later, that too had disappeared. Without any fanfare, whatever this was was done. The pins and needles that had until then covered my whole body simply were no longer.
My skin would never again become noisy.
No doubt the enthusiasm for enlightenment with which the course was ripe had led me to attend to this process especially vigilantly. For I expected that when this plane had done its work I’d find myself in some amazing new state of consciousness.
But no. When the plane had finally worked its way out the soles of my feet, my state of consciousness didn’t shift. I was actually surprised. Despite the silent epidermis, nothing life changing had happened. Same thoughts. Same snatches of Stones tunes. Same anxieties.
It must have been some meditative blip, I told myself, some “release of stress,” which is what we said to each other about meditative experiences when we didn’t know what else to say. But except for the quieter skin and whatever slight level of calm that had brought, I just couldn’t sense any effects. Mostly it was just odd.
But as I’m thinking back to those days, I’m looking out the bay window at a wintery scene, watching a flock of birds float by, legs dangling awkwardly beneath, the orange beam of the sunrise pointing straight up behind them. Watching them, I am entirely unaware of the surface of my skin. But I am aware how settled I feel as I watch them, how focused and welcoming I am of this moment. It makes me wonder if just a little of the focus I feel doesn’t have something to do with that cleansing of 35 years ago and whether without it I would be just that much more distracted for reasons I could never know. I cannot be sure what of today connects to a shift that began back then. But I am settled with the snowfall and the sunrise and the birds and grateful for the ability to welcome them on this crystalline winter’s morn.
Ok, back to the story. About a month later, with a sensation so strong that I grabbed at my neck, a tiny tube inside the back of my head suddenly went “zip.” And it instantly became silent.
Even after my skin had shifted into quiet, I had never noticed any particular sensations inside my neck. But the moment that bundle of nerves, or whatever it was, zipped itself into silence, I knew that in that area too there had always been faint pins and needles, some understated white noise. I realized it had always been there only when it disappeared.
The cleansing of that little tube had an interesting effect. In some way I can’t quite describe, I was able to shift my awareness from looking at the spaciousness to standing within it. And when I did, I suddenly found myself in some strange and dizzying spaciousness, where my sense of myself now extended noticeably. It, or I, was bottomless and utterly devoid of movement.
With the part of me that could stand outside, I could assign it a place (left side, rear of neck) and a size (perhaps a sixteenth inch by an inch and a half). From within it, it was placeless, directionless, without any obvious boundaries.
Two or three days later during an afternoon meditation, again without warning, a second tiny tube—just to the right of the first— unzipped itself into silence. Again there had always been some pins and needles sensation in that tiny space, and again it instantly and totally vanished.
The only difference between this and the first tube was that when this one disappeared into silence, it seemed to merge utterly with the first. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the first tiny strand now widened to include the second. Wider though it was from the outside, when I shifted my attention to be within it, there was no change in the spaciousness whatsoever.
Except that it may have become just a little easier to shift my attention to be within it, the openness itself was no different. Standing inside this oddly silent breadth, I still felt a little dizzy, as if I couldn’t find my bearings or sense a bottom. It was as if the back of my head contained a wormhole to the infinite.
But only a wormhole. Surreal though it sounds, the rest of me still felt the same. My mind was still full of thoughts. I still worried at dinner that Judith didn’t smile at me brightly enough. I still heard snatches of Crosby, Stills and Nash tunes. Yet now at the same time a new and strangely dizzying strand of silence, endlessness.
With that second unzipping the pattern seemed to have set itself. After two or three days, another strand just to the right would zluuuup itself down. The bottomlessness would become a little wider (from the outside) and from within become just a little easier to place my attention to be from within it. A few days after that, another tube.
Silence almost disappears upon arrival. The sense of a separate tube or nerve bundle was so quickly absorbed into the expanding width that, except when it was unzipping itself, the next tubule simply disappeared as a distinct zone. Like a raindrop disappearing into the ocean, each tube merged indistinguishably with the widening emptiness.
Every few days another strand would zip off and again merge into the whole. Over weeks a third, then a half, then most of the back of my skull became silent bottomless.
And different. I lived a strangely dual life during those weeks. I continued to think, meditate, hear snatches of Beatles tunes, be taken with how great some girl had looked, write letters.
But now amidst the noise and chatter, there was something new, open and strangely magnetic. It didn’t say anything. It didn’t give me courage or issue commands. It didn’t make my mind still, as I thought enlightenment would. Yet despite its understated simplicity, I couldn’t but be terribly aware of it. Something new was here, something spacious, barely sensible and of a nature unlike anything else in my life. And weirdly without end.
The descending plane on my skin had been horizontal. The split here was vertical: silence on the left, activity on the right. In fact it made me a little dizzy. Silence had a lightness to it in comparison to the thinking part, as if it weighed nothing. Going down the stairs I actually tended to list.
This all made even less sense than the changes in my skin, which had made little. Bundles of brain-stem neurons, or whatever they were, unzipping themselves? Into nothingness? And one after another in a slow, nearly mechanical order? The forces that were bringing this about and the systematic widening of this strange whatever-it-wasn’t were well beyond anything I could understand at 25. Or at 60 for that matter.
I wish I could say that I was doing something to make these tubes unzloop themselves. But from my side all I was doing was sitting in my hotel room and going through my meditation, pranayama and yoga rounds. The couple of years of regular TM, self reflection, retreats, hanging around Maharishi, and committing to be in that room for so many months had no doubt set the stage. Yet lots of very sincere folk in other hotel rooms had done all this and more, and, from the reports then and later, few were undergoing anything quite like this. There’s probably some combination of grace and effort involved in these things. But all I knew was that I wasn’t making this happen.
I didn’t tell anyone about any of this at the time, or for many years. It was all just too … too… weird! This was not some ultimate peace. I hadn’t suddenly become some happy or more compassionate camper. From what I could tell, except for this new half-head of silence, I hadn’t changed a whit. No, all this was just too confusing, too embarrassingly strange to want to talk about it!
For a while I actually thought that I was having a stroke. I kept checking in the mirror for facial droop. Or maybe it was something psychological. Probably though, I thought, this was just another of those meditation quirks, “some release of stress,” soon to be forgotten.
But on, January 4, 1972, at about 4 in the afternoon, the last little tube on the far right side of my neck zipped itself into extinction. And I’ve never forgotten.
When that last strand zlooped off and merged into the openness, something did change, and noticeably. Several things in fact. Even if I hadn’t been as hyper-vigilant about my inner states as I was, I could not have missed the shift. Who I was, how I thought, how I saw, even how I would sleep from that night on were now, and would remain ever after, different.
What I noticed immediately was that almost all of the background noise in my mind had disappeared. Behind every moment of thinking, seeing or hearing, there had always been other, fainter thoughts, odd snatches of music, hints of feelings, errands I shouldn’t forget, half-formed sentences. You know, the monkey mind. Again, I doubt I could have told you before that afternoon, but this chattering brain-hubbub had been constant. Until the moment it wasn’t.
Even when the silence was growing but hadn’t yet spread across the back of my mind, all these quieter thoughts and feelings had continued to burble along underneath, as if happy for the space in my head to play. They continued even when they only had a tiny corner. But the moment that last little tube merged into the whole, they vanished. Like a newly Zambonied ice rink, too slippery to stand on, my mind became clean, empty. The burbling background chatter simply disappeared.
Oh, I still thought. That was the confusing part. Thinking didn’t stop. Maharishi had told us about gaining a perfect focus, a mind without any thoughts at all. This clearly wasn’t that. And the content didn’t change: same girl, something Maharishi had said, a letter home I was writing, when to go for lunch. My mind hadn’t shut up.
What did stop was the inarticulate mutterings, the endless half thoughts beneath my thinking. It was as if behind the movie of my mind had been scrims behind scrims of thought, dimmer, movies I could barely make out. But that afternoon it was as if the light had suddenly shifted so that the front scrim became opaque and suddenly I was watching just one movie. I was thinking only one thought at a time.
Not perfect quiescence, but much more focused. Whereas before I had been struggling to keep my attention where I wanted, I suddenly was able to put my attention on something and have it pretty much stay there. Oh, I still had to bring the old monkey mind back sometimes. But now I was taming only one monkey, not a herd. It was like getting eye glasses for the mind.
I was disappointed though, of course. Maharishi had assured us of a perfectly silent mind, but I was still thinking.
Though I wouldn’t realize it for many years, however, there was a promise in that moment. I only recognized it perhaps 20 years later, when I was a professor at Hunter College. A student asked me a question to which I didn’t have a ready answer. I paused, naturally. And while I and the class waited, I realized—with not a little astonishment—that at that moment I was not thinking any thoughts at all. My mind was completely silent. Some sort of planning about what I was to say seemed to be going on. But wherever that was taking place, it wasn’t anywhere in my conscious mind. I was aware only of a richly pregnant silence.
After a pause—of normal length, was my sense—the answer came out. I had no idea ahead of time what I was going to say, for my mind had been silent. In fact I heard my answer only when they did. And it wasn’t half bad! I’ve often caught myself scoping something out with this strange way of not thinking, and not knowing ahead of time what I’m going to say. Thoughtless thinking.
But none of this did I know to expect on that January afternoon in Mallorca. All I knew then was that though the background noise had disappeared and I was focusing on one thought at a time, I was still thinking. So this shift could not be the “silent mind of enlightenment” for which I, like all 2500 of us, had been waiting.
A second effect became obvious as that last tube zipped itself off. This one is harder to describe. If you had asked me before that afternoon who or what I, Robert Forman, was, I probably would have pointed to somewhere on my mid chest and said, “I’m here, me, Robert!” I’d be trying to get at some vaguely localized sense of a self that I suspect we all have. I, me, Robert, was in there—somewhere.
But once that last strand fell into silent openness, my sense of who or what I was instantly changed with it. I was now the new bottomlessness. Or rather it, the vast openness, was now me.
Strangely enough, there was nothing Robert-ish in this new sense of myself. The bottomlessness had no particularity. It had nothing to do with this particular guy, Robert. What or who I was (and continue to be) became more like an “it.” “It,” the consciousness that beheld whatever I saw, felt or spoke, was now me (boy this is hard to express!). Everything I did, thought about, ate, laughed at, even my anxieties, were now encountered by or from within this strangely endless translucence. “I” was now “It.”
These are deep waters. I’ve been living this way for almost 40 years and I’m still not sure I understand it. Our sense of a self is something we carry or are for all our lives, without really knowing very much about it. We all share some such vague and unlocalized sense of what or who we are, I think, though we can’t quite grasp what that is. But that day my ineffable sense of who or what I am shifted into this weirdly characterless yet infinite openness.
The very idea that we can change something so intimate to who we are, so core, must sound preposterous! Had it not happened to me that afternoon I would never have known it possible. Oh, Maharishi had often described a “change in self” and a “shift in consciousness.” I’d probably said these very words a hundred times. But I had no idea, really, what such phrases meant or what it might feel like. To shift your deep and unsayable sense of a self into some empty fullness? I could never have imagined such a shift before I knew it. And I knew it only because I had become it!
Yet ever since that January day, if someone were to ask me, “who are you, really?” I would now answer quite differently. My sense of who I am actually become much more specific, even precise. No more do I have to point inside to some “vaguely non-localized sense” of a self. What or who I am is now spacious emptiness. Period. I’d touched it occasionally in silent moments in meditation or on walks. But from that day on it became the very me that was wondering about it. I became, and have remained, “It.”
What surprised me about this deep change in what I am was that it was so much more modest, so different in kind and quality than anything I could have known to expect. The only thing I could have hoped for was something in my world, within my repertoire of experience, I suppose. We just have no way to conceive of anything else. I could only look for what I could imagine, hope for something that answered my longings, cured my wounds or made me happier. But this silence, this shift in who I was, was simply outside my repertoire. It was of a whole different kind and quality than anything I knew. And it came of its own accord.
I discovered a third effect some two days later. I was standing on the triangular porch off my hotel room, looking through the mist at the white caps dotting the Mediterranean. Something about the scene was somehow different. The sea seemed particularly vibrant, the fog vivid. The drizzle against my bare arms felt unusually cool and crisp.
Then it occurred to me: what was different wasn’t the scene. It was me. The Mediterranean was so alive, the mist so cool because I was now more alive to them!
Standing on that porch, feeing the chilly January air on my cheeks, unlike where I used to be, I was no longer in the scene. Rather I was holding it, conscious of it, attending to it.
Maharishi had talked endlessly about an enigmatic aspect of enlightenment: sak in or witnessing. In it, silent consciousness
is experienced as wholly separate from activity…17
When the mind is experiencing objects through the senses, he is awake in the awareness of his self as separate from the field of experience and action. … He is awake in the world and awake in himself.18
I had always imagined this sak in, “witnessing,” to be some sort of doubled-up consciousness, as if you’d stand back, arms folded, and make yourself watch yourself. The few times something like this had happened before, I was both looking at something and trying to watch myself look. While I was reading, for example, I’d also imagine myself as if from a few feet away, sensing myself sitting in the chair reading. It sounds, and was, pretty grueling.
But leaning against that cool porch railing, feeling the drizzle on my forearms, was just the opposite. There was no extra work in this experience; witnessing was utterly effortless. Looking over the misty dunes and the white caps, I was simply conscious that I was looking, feeling, thinking. I was at once a seeing and a separate, silent awakeness. It was that awakeness that was conscious of all this. And being so terribly conscious at that moment, witnessing myself seeing, was astonishingly fresh! I was simply and richly conscious of being there, both looking at the sea and conscious of doing so. How utterly normal! How utterly new!
I was not trying to witness, not even a little. I just was watching it all. And doing so took as little additional effort as it takes to have a right hand. I was just present to the white caps, present to the cool of the porch rail, present to the mist. I was conscious and conscious of being conscious, that’s all.
I stood at that porch rail for the longest time, feeling the light rain, watching the clouds rolling in above the churning waves, sak in.
I am struck with the dualism in what I’ve just written. Seeing and at the same time aware of the seeing. Silent consciousness plus active in the world. Absolute and relative.
Yet my experience didn’t become dual. The moment itself — conscious of those whitecaps and of awareness itself — was deliciously integrated.
What had come into play was a newly dual structure. Before that time, I experienced all my thoughts, feelings, excitements and whatnot as all jumbled together with who or what I was. I had always been a single changing, moving, intermixed heap of processes.19
But starting that day, that heap was no longer heaped. I was conscious and I was seeing. And ever since there have been two very distinct kinds of things in my every moment: a moving, thinking, feeling, embodied thing, a Robert if you like. And an unmoving, witnessing, unchanging conscious thing, an “It.” The seer and the seen, silence and activity, absolute and relative, now structurally distinct. I am dual. And I am effortlessly one.
When the weather cleared the next week, I took my first walk down to the beach. Cumulous clouds caught my eye, billowing white and cottony above the wide curve of the Mediterranean, up and up and behind one another. The billows, the ocean and even the light haze above the water seemed to reach backwards more than I’d ever noticed, as if they’d gotten thicker. The whole scene had a surprising depth to it. When I turned back towards the Karina, one scrawny tree seemed especially in front of the next. And the bushes were behind. It was like I had put on 3-D glasses.
This was a fourth effect. I’ve always seen depth like anyone else, I suppose. But this was categorically different. It was as if every-thing—thick or thin, tall or short, heavy or cumulous-light—had become strangely thickened, more layered. Left, right, up, down, front and behind—each seemed more insistent than they ever had. The world became deep. I liked it.
As I’ve lived over the years with the changes wrought by that January shift, sometimes I’ve doubted if anything at all happened. It’s become so normal that I have sometimes wondered if I just made all this up. But then I’ll find myself on a drive through the Colorado Rockies and be bowled over by the height above height of a rounded forest hilltop. Or I’ll drive across New York City’s Triboro Bridge and be astonished by the depth of the canyons of glass and steel, and I cannot possibly miss the visual changes that began that month.
Looking out my window just now, a herd of five deer stand like sculptures in the distance, bending into the snow for the grasses hidden beneath. There is a hill behind them and another behind that. To the left and further back, another mound rises even higher, hills rising and disappearing like breathing abdomens. Through the graying mist I can just make out another one even further back. Patches of green grass peer up through forests of snow, and behind them and on the left, red barns and white farm houses dot the hills. Just above them, jagged clouds hang heavy with snow like gauzy chandeliers, and all beneath the endless canopy of the sky.
I became aware of one final effect about a week after that cumulous walk. I woke up one morning certain that, although I’d clearly been asleep, all of me actually hadn’t been. Some odd bit of awareness had persisted through the night, awake. I had been fully asleep, for sure, but not quite, not all of me.
Maharishi often told us that one of the marks of enlightenment would be what he called “wakefulness in sleep.” Even though you’re asleep, something inside remains conscious.
“the transcendent state continues to maintain itself at all times, in a natural manner, irrespective of the different states of waking, dreaming or sleeping.”20
You or “it” remains aware of your own consciousness even while sleeping: “Even when it is night for all others,” as the Gita put it, you remain wakeful.”21
Frankly wakefulness in sleep had always sounded pretty awful. Sometimes I had lain half awake all night, worrying about how tired I was going to feel the next day, wondering what I had eaten that had caused such insomnia and thinking maybe I should get up and open the window and … But then I’d get up and feel surprisingly refreshed. The idea that I’d have to go through this every night for the rest of my life sounded positively grueling!
But witnessed sleep that night, and every night since, actually seemed quite natural. I was awake inside, sure, but the wakeful part was so understated, so unobtrusive and natural that there was nothing at all traumatic about it. Even today, I hardly bother to notice whether I was awake inside, unless like last night (when I was writing this section) I have some reason to notice. But it’s there, it’s how I sleep.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if I’ve actually slept. Here is another peculiar side effect of all this. Since waking and sleeping are so continuous, to know if I’ve been asleep I have to check the clock to see how long I’ve “not been asleep.” Weird, but you get used to it.
Strangely enough, this new sleep pattern has turned out to be probably the most useful aspect of the shift. Before that time I used to wake up bleary eyed and fogged over. I’d hit the snooze alarm, wake up, fall asleep and hit the snooze button again. Finally I’d wake up, all groggy and grumpy. But ever since that morning, when it’s time to wake up, I’m just awake. There’s no bleariness, no snooze button. I’m just awake. I suppose it’s because consciousness doesn’t have to switch states, since I was never totally out.
The main advantage of this over the years has been that if the phone rings in the middle of the night I can just pick it up and talk. This is not to say I necessarily want to answer some midnight call (like from my daughter’s teenage girlfriends). But I can if I choose, for my faculties haven’t entirely shut down like they used to. They’ve gone on something like “pause.” Sometimes I’ve wondered if my kids ever noticed that when they’d call or come home late and whisper something in the door, I’d answer.
Despite all these changes, big and small, and with all the perspective of an impatient 25 year old, all I felt back then was disappointment. My mind hadn’t become totally silent, the world hadn’t been transformed, and I was still spinning my up/down three by five. I still got nervous before I went downstairs to dinner. I was still afraid I’d never make a decent TM teacher and I was still often lonely. Those tubes and sleep changes were interesting and all, but compared to the end of all suffering for which I was waiting, this was pretty much squat.
Ah the impatience of the young! For sitting here, some 40 years later, these seemingly small changes were the beginning. It was an understated earthquake: for the first time in my life, probably for the first time in the life of anyone in my genetic lineage, I now was thinking only one thing at a time. I was conscious and aware that I was, and without effort. And I now knew myself as an empty, spacious consciousness.
Since that time, whatever this strange and effortless otherness may be, it has seeped into so many byways of my life that even here in my hermitage I’m still discovering its ramifications. It would eventually help me rise like Lazarus out of the tomb of anxiety and fear in which I had been long buried. It would eventually lead me to rethink every choice I had made and every belief I had held. It would call me to recreate every relationship I cared about and to a level I could not have even conceived back then. It would cause me to relinquish nearly everything I had held dear or had known myself to be. And slowly, haltingly, but genuinely, in its shadow I would become freer.
And ever since, while the rest of my mind and life percolates along in its active way, this new piece and structure are just there, steady as you go. I am happy and it’s there. I am sad and it’s there. I am bicycling or anxious for reasons I do not know, and it’s there. It is a strangely steady something in an unsteady life, a candle flame in a blizzard.
Behind everything I do now is this bottomless emptiness, so open as to be without end. I have grown accustomed to the fact that this is now me. Not the me of doing dishes, not the me that is worried or writing a paper, not the me that feels alone or scared or happy. But it is the me that watches and lives and holds it all. I am, strange to say, infinite. And astonishingly, miraculously, the old me is here as well.
A steady vastness like this so remarkable, so unlike the rest of what I can know or be that my life would eventually have to re-form itself around it (or live forever unresolved, bifurcated). Sweet soft water wears down rock cliffs, given long enough, and this empty quiet carries something of such gentle inevitability.
It was neither sweet nor kindly nor angry. It didn’t end my loneliness and it didn’t make my anxieties go away. It was not a good feeling, except in a very narrow sense. Nor was it painful. It simply was. And is. It has remained humble, quiet and unassuming in almost every way. But it is real and permanent and of a nature I could not and still cannot possibly understand.
You can expect experiences like the ones you’ve known. You can imagine yourself in a cool breeze in a sunlit lagoon, even when you are not there. You can imagine the smooth warmth of a good massage. But absolute total effortlessness, as permanent and as peaceful when you are still as when you are running, the same whether you are awake or deeply asleep, you simply cannot conceive, not quite. You can imagine something in your consciousness, when you are focused and attentive. But a shift in that very consciousness, your becoming a permanent bottomlessness that is aware of it all, you simply have no way to imagine, not really. That is, until you are it.
With my months and years of meditative practice and of letting go, I had no doubt helped lay the ground for it. Effort, as I’ve said, clearly played its role. But an unflinching silence like this, real and of a nature so beyond our own, can only come to us by grace, not from us, not from effort. We simply cannot create that which we cannot imagine. For consciousness at this level must be an outcropping from a ganz andere, something wholly other.
As I remember those disappearing strands and the quiet that entered my life those weeks, I am looking out at the burdock pods and thistles, bent under the weight of the snow, glistening in the afternoon light. I find myself welcoming the thistles and stems in a way I doubt I could have long ago, welcoming the pods and the shimmers of blowing snow as if here with me, inside my belly. It is as if I am tuned into the moment with some diaphanous glue and there is no turning away. This world-welcoming has matured over the decades in ways I could not have expected back then. Yet in some quiet way it clearly is the inheritance I have received from the understated gift that began in that love seat so long ago. And I am grateful.
None of this did I know at the time though. I had no idea. All I knew was that this wasn’t what I had been pining for, and I was disappointed.
I was looking for spiritual party favors. What I got was an existential earthquake.