Chapter 5

Feeling

It and Ducks

Coming up the icy drive last night, my car slid helplessly back down the hill towards the pond and ended up perched over a ditch. I’m waiting for the tow truck to come, feeling at once a little foolish and like laughing. If I tell the real truth, I’m somewhat ashamed too: What’s wrong with me that I couldn’t get my car up the hill? Why did I let my tires get so bald? I’m feeling very much the incompetent kid, waiting for daddy to come in his big tow truck and make it all better! And like giggling.

It’s a kind of dance I’m in just now. With the frigid window on one side and the warm stove on the other, the heat and the cold and the embarrassment and the silence and the giggles and the shame are all jumbled together at once. No one feeling dominates. There is a kind of flowing ease between them all, embarrassment becoming chill becoming silence becoming …

The ease I feel in flowing from sensations to thoughts to silence to feelings seems of a piece with the ease that dawned all those years ago in Mallorca. I don’t have to try to be open in the silence. I just am. And I am not working here to make these feelings and impressions flow. I am nearly as effortless in the face of all these sensations and emotions as I am to It.

It didn’t used to be like this. Despite finding a dharma, a calling, I was struggling in my thirties to avoid experiencing some pretty nasty, out-of-control feelings. The most pressing of these came up around class work. Oh, my grades were fine, actually, but every time I’d turn in a paper, see a professor in the hall or open a test booklet, my heart would race.

I remember standing in front of Professor Proudfoot’s office one day, for example, actually shaking. “He’ll trash the paper” I’d just handed him, I thought. “He’ll rip apart the section on Russell.” “He’ll tell me I didn’t understand metaphysics” (something that was true). “He’ll trash some sloppy footnotes.” “He just won’t like it!” and I’d wonder what on earth I had been thinking when I turned it in and or why the hell I had come to graduate school in the first place? He’d kick me out of Columbia for sure this time, and I’d be ashamed and end up broke and homeless and ...

And I had no idea how to get off the obsessional mouse wheel. My fear of professors grew and grew over the first years of graduate school. I should find a psychotherapist, I kept thinking.

But meditation would take care of it, I kept telling myself. Meditation relieves stress. And I carry the silence. It’ll be fine.

But the day I stood in front of Professor Proudfoot’s office actually shaking in a full blown panic attack was something new. It was time.

I don’t know about other people, but for me deciding to go to a psychotherapist as an adult was an huge deal. Going now meant that I wasn’t OK, that meditation hadn’t done it all, that silence didn’t fix everything. Despite a decade and a half of regular meditation and a decade of inward spaciousness, it meant I was in trouble.

I had come to the end of a dream, standing at that door: the comforting fiction that it’ll all be better, or the solace that silence is enough. It was another disillusionment, but one notch deeper.

Yet standing at that doorway was its own kind of beginning as well, I can see from here. With that declaration, that it was time, I took the first step on my own path. I was now beginning to apply what I’d discovered with the vastness in my own way. I was answering the whisper I think we all feel, to live it everywhere, to find a way to flow, wherever we are blocked. And that moment was when I began to answer it in my way.

There are no more systems, no more masters at this point. You just sense the whisper “you are blocked here too,” and try whatever you can to find your way. “Keep going,” is all it says, “even though your beliefs say you aren’t supposed to need to. Keep going, for you are still resisting, still in pain, still hurting others. Keep going.”

It wasn’t long before I was standing in front of another door, this one to the comfortingly rumpled West Side office of Dr. Ken Ruge, a highly recommended psychotherapist. It was from Ken that I learned the term “panic attack,” and it took months of weekly sessions to get a handle on them.

What I discovered there, of course, had to do with my past, my particular family and my own confusions. Be it enough to say that there had been enormous stress in my family on competence and success, I discovered, and I was afraid of being neither. My father the businessman used to say that the “only way you can keep score in life is the size of the bank account.” When he would talk about someone whose didn’t have as high a “score” as he—an MSW, a psychotherapist, an artist or teacher—he would refer to them with a wave of his hand and a little puff of air, as if he was brushing away a dust ball. His key to success was to take control and to, as he put it, “keep all your ducks in a row.”

To stand in front of Professor Proudfoot’s door was to be written off behind that hand wave. I wasn’t running from graduate school or some lanky professor. I was running from Dad’s disapproval, from disappearing. It was the unfilled longings from childhood I was panicky about, that that I’d never be seen, never exist.

Our spiritual traditions, and silence itself, may cure the confusion between consciousness and its contents. But it doesn’t cure old self images, doesn’t make us feel worthy when we never have, doesn’t put our footnotes in order. And it certainly cannot provide the respect of someone you admire.

John Welwood catches the mistake best:

While spiritual traditions generally explain the cause of suffering in general terms as the result of ignorance, faulty perception, or disconnection from our true nature, Western psychology provides a more specific developmental understanding. It shows how suffering stems from childhood conditioning, in particular, from static and distorted images of self and other that we carry with us in the baggage of our past.

No, the solution here couldn’t come from meditation or prayer or Yoga poses. I had to feel how afraid I was of those ducks getting out of their rows and feel that desperate longing for approval. I had to feel that hand wave, dread it, feel it wipe me out of existence. And then feel it some more.

Only after I had named my fear and felt that puff of air, only when I had laughed at those ducks, did I eventually find myself sitting in front of Professor Proudfoot’s door, having turned in a paper on Buddhist Epistemology, just waiting. No constricted throat, I noticed, no rapid heartbeat. Oh, I still fully expected him to rip my paper apart. A good professor, which he was, does that. But, I saw with astonishment, I was just seated there, calm, patient, erect.

Sitting in front of that door, erect in my chair, it occurred to me, was just like the silence itself. I was simple at that moment, patient, just there, like the inward steadiness. It took no effort to wait like that, as it takes no effort to live the silence.

Nothing flashy. No neon lights or crashing symbols. Just where there had been fear and churning, there was now simplicity.

“That’s interesting,” I said to myself with a smile.

It and Sexuality

After I had pretty much resolved the panic attacks, I kept on with therapy. I knew even larger issues loomed, mostly having to do with my terribly confused relationships with the female of the species. Maybe all men struggle here, and all women in their way, I don’t know. But I sure did.

Even though I’d been married nearly a decade, I was anything but easy around the woman I lived with. And I still found myself often lost in some pretty intense daydreams — women I knew, women I saw on the subway, women I’d dated long ago — angry, horny, needy, even, I am embarrassed to admit, rape fantasies. Sometimes I’d come out breathing hard, terrified of my own violence. Clearly silence wasn’t curing the boy/girl matter.

Nor did silence cure the sexual perturbations of the guru gang either, I knew even then. Tibetan Lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for example, who was reported to got so drunk sometimes that he had to be helped off the stage, was said to have slept openly with female disciples. His “dharma heir,” Osel Tendzin, not only had frequent sex with his students, but also supposedly hid from them that he had the AIDS virus and could infect them. The abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, Richard Baker Roshi, lost his job over his repeated affairs with female disciples, including, I heard, his best friend’s wife. The founder of the Hindu Siddha Yoga movement, Swami Muktananda, reportedly slept with some of his pre-pubescent disciples.

Out of 54 Buddhist, Hindu and Jain teachers in the United States, according to psychologist Jack Kornfield, only 15 had lived up to their tradition’s proscriptions of celibacy.57 Of the sexually active 39, some 34 had affairs with current students.

Five of the six most esteemed Zen Buddhist masters in the United States, who presumably were selected by an enlightened teacher abroad to teach, were involved in grossly self-centered and conspicuously unenlightened behavior.”58

Then there were the western ministers. They don’t talk about enlightenment much, but they do emphasize chastity, the sanctity of marriage and their own faith. But Evangelical preacher Jimmy Swaggart railed on and on about sex, loss of “family values” and prostitution, while surreptitiously frequenting prostitutes. Colorado Evangelist Ted Haggard preached vociferously against the “vile sin of homosexuality” while himself engaging in a three year relationship with a gay prostitute. New age Rabbi Mordechai Gafni was seductive enough to cause him to resign his position in Israel’s Bayit Chadash in disgrace.59 And strangest of all, an Iranian mullah, Hojatoleslam Hasan Golestani, taped himself having sex with his friend’s wife!60

And we cannot forget the 4,392 men, some 4% of American Catholic priests, who were accused of being pedophiles.61

What’s going on here?

It is too easy to answer that all these sexual misadventures are just the fault of a few bad apples.

That would be true. But the failure here is deeper, and it’s time to say so.

Spiritual enlightenment, religious transformation, being twice born just may be, with reference to sexual issues, incomplete.

Enlightenment or being saved by God is important. It is the great unmingling, a revelation of our connection with the divine or some underlying energy: Brahman, Buddha-mind, Tao, God, the ultimate. I believe this was what our traditions were celebrating. And it was, apparently enough for most of history. But in our highly sexualized, post pill, post feminine liberation, it is no longer enough.

After all, gurus, rabbis and ministers in 1150 or 1850 or even 1950 didn’t face what we must on a daily basis. They had to confront their own sexual urges, for sure. But, occasional stories like David and Bathsheba notwithstanding, opportunities for sexual relationships were relatively limited. The sexual urges of monks and nuns were encountered largely in the privacy of their own cells and single-gendered monasteries. Although the sexuality of the religious was probably always an issue, for most of history one’s personal issues with sexuality probably wasn’t the dominant life-issue.

In the traditional cultures of Asia, it was a viable option for a yogi to pursue spiritual development apart from worldly involvement, or to live purely as the impersonal universal, without having much of a personal life or transforming the structures of that life. These older cultures provided a religious context that honored and supported spiritual retreat and placed little or no emphasis on individual concerns.

Their life’s challenge had to do with something broader, about sin more broadly or ignorance and on a metaphysical salvation. Most traditions, especially Eastern religions, focused especially on universal love and transcending the personal. Which could, in my experience, easily lead to a kind of avoidance.62

But few of us are monks any more or cloistered, and today, with miniskirts and washboard abs, sexuality is constantly stressed. We simply cannot avoid the issue of sexuality, and in our post-Freud era, deny our conscious and unconscious drives. If indeed we ever could, we can no longer transcend the personal.63

Frankly I think that the spiritual challenge of today is greater than it was in traditional times. We have to confront our own and other people’s sexuality every day, overtly and often publically, on the streets, on the TV, in the theatres and on the internet.

And sex, though more readily available today, is, especially for spiritual teachers, far more dangerous. In ancient times when a spiritual leader committed a sexual or some other peccadillo, their disciples would be likely to try to keep it under wraps, either because that was the tradition, or because they believed it to have a deeper spiritual logic (as in, “he did it to raise our spiritual consciousness or through the wonderfully slippery “Crazy Wisdom” excuse) or to protect their masters’ reputation, or all of the above.64

But today we are less cowed by authority.65 In our era of the suspicion of power, gotcha journalism and (one hopes) greater sensitivity to sexual harassment, wayward priests or roshis are more likely to be outted, humiliated and even arrested. Sexual peccadilloes today are dangerous for your neighborhood guru.

I like to believe that most of our spiritual teachers and ministers have indeed undergone deep inner shifts. But if so, it’s obvious that such shifts do not lead to transparent and healthy enough sexual lives. Enlightenment or being twice born is, as I said, no longer enough.

The complete life, the good human life, must, I’m coming to see, include both a transformed inner life and a transformed outer life. To be complete our spiritual goal must include both a deep inner freedom and enough self-awareness to recognize when we’re feeling or acting in ways that are stuck or corrupt. And it must include the courage to actually change.

Spirit and psyche address different aspects of the complete life: the unconditioned and inward is not the same as the personal and conditioned.

Spiritual practice, especially mysticism, points toward a timeless trans-human reality, while psychological work addresses the evolving human realm, with all its issues of personal meaning and interpersonal relationship.66

If we are to live a full, sane, complete life, we will have to heal both today.

OK, lets talk about sex. I want to say at the outset that I am not completely clean about sexuality, by which I mean being both open and alive to it yet with clear and impeccable boundaries. Since the real issues around sexuality are quite taboo in our society, it is hard to say, but it’s my impression that very few of us live a fully clean, healthy sexuality.

All I can claim is that I am a lot cleaner than I used to be. And I am because of a long process that began about six months after resolving my panic about professors. I was in Ken’s office when I noticed a curtain rod and dark curtain hanging in a window across the street. “Funny,” I remarked to him almost in passing, “it looks like belts.”

That billowing curtain caught my eye again a couple of weeks later. It reminded me even more clearly of the belt rack in my closet when I was a kid, and I suddenly felt terrified. I flashed on my mother towering over me.

“What’s this about?” I wondered aloud to Ken. “I keep seeing this image of my mother standing over me, with a belt raised over her head. What on earth? …”

Over the next few weeks, in and out of sessions, I found myself preoccupied with that billowing curtain and belts. Images of my pre-teen bedroom came in and out of focus: black and white checkered bedspread, dark mahogany desk, white muslin curtains. And flashes of my mother, towering above like the terrifying Hindu goddess Kali, raising a belt.

Slowly, in bits and pieces, and with enormous waves of belly-sinking dread, I began to bring to mind what I was forbidden to remember. I’m maybe 10 or 12 and hadn’t picked up my clothes, or had come to dinner ten minutes late, or had brought home some teacher’s note saying I’d joked around in class. And my mother would come flying into my bedroom in a rage.

“What is this, a pig sty?”

“Why did you embarrass me in front of my friends?” she’d yell, damn near beet red.

“You won’t amount to anything!”

“What’s wrong with you?”

And then there was the night. She’d found the leather suitcase in which I’d stashed the pile of “girly magazines” some 7th grade friend had laid on me. She careened nearly apoplectic into my room, climbed onto my chair, thrown it down from the top shelf and began heaving the magazines around the room.

“How could you even look at such filth?” she raged, throwing glossy bits of breast and torso across the floor like feces.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly, “Jack gave them to me.”

“What are you some kind of pervert?” she raged. And by now in full histrionic, she chanted:

“You want to see naked women? …. I’ll show you a naked woman!” and with that began to pull her nightgown over her head …

“No Mom, stop!”

She relented, probably ashamed at her own jealous fury ... then she reached over to the belt rack in my closet, grabbed the widest belt and raised it over her head …

I hid under my pillow… afraid, disgusted, embarrassed, shivering from the terrifying intensity and betrayal …

I turned and looked up, and watched that belt snaking high above her head, time nearly frozen. I heard it whine through the air and felt it sharp and hot on my back. I heard her grunt again with effort and felt more than heard it creasing through the air a second time, and a third ...

In the safety of Ken’s love, I relived those moments again and again. I heard the yelling. I felt the heat on my back… I smelled the pillow, felt the leather. I even shivered again. I told him every gory detail I could dredge up. I told Yvonne. I scribbled new details into my journal. I felt it again, told it again. I felt the queer let down that is betrayal. I felt the chest heat of the anger I had not been allowed to admit. I felt the fear. I felt the loneliness.

I came to see how and why I had to push it all out of my memory. To tell anyone, even to remember it, would have been too dangerous to her, to the family, to me. No wonder I had such violent day dreams! And could this be what those whispering voices had been trying to tell me, two decades before?

The first friend I told was Phil Goldberg. I got so choked up I could hardly get through the story. When I shared it with Glenn and Peggy a year later, I could tell it just a notch easier.

By four years later the heat had pretty much seeped out of the balloon. I came to be able to tell the story reasonably straight, feel the whacking or remember those magazines without reacting all that much.

By now it’s just part of my history; it’s almost emotionally neutral. I still tell the tale every now and again. But now I use it to make a point, as I’m doing here. I own it now, not the other way round.

Though painful as hell, to remember such confusing childhood events or even traumas in enough detail to drain them of their sepsis is an enormous gift. It is an essential step in coming to terms with those very ancient, very human, drives. I can’t see who they can get cleaned up without being faced.

I may be wrong, but I doubt a Shankara or a St. Theresa or a Muslim mystic like Rabi’a ever knew to confront such personal issues.67 Before Freud we human beings just didn’t know about the long-lasting effects of our fathers being distant or our mothers overly solicitous, or that we had to be overachievers to be loved. Nor did we know, as a species, that our childhood horrors lose their power over us only when we bring them, in all their gory detail, to full conscious light.

There’s no fault in this. Humanity just didn’t know. Our great teachers lived before words like “ego” or “superego” came to mean quite what they do today.68

Without the frame of psycho-therapy, without knowing how their individual concerns and history shaped or scarred them, no wonder our ancient spiritual teachers thought that gaining an impersonal Brahman or the Divine was enough.

But it is no longer enough. We must invite in our individual histories, especially where they were painful, and untangle our personal confusions in order to become free, effortless human beings. We know this now. The deepest spiritual awareness or the encounter with the divine do not by themselves salve our personal wounds, resolve our sexual conundrums or cure our inappropriate behaviors.

Silence alone, Christ Consciousness alone, addresses none of this. The checks on my childhood bedspread, the color of my mothers’ fingernails, the welts I could not allow myself to remember but could not forget—none were to be found in the empty bottomlessness. Silence and shadows, grace and grit, dwell in different domains of reality.

It was only in bringing the pain of those forbidden memories to the light of consciousness that I began the long process of welcoming and becoming larger than them. Only when I saw and said and wept it all out again and again did the toxicity of all those events begin to melt and my sexuality begin to be just another part of who I am. Only then could I begin the lifelong task of learning to integrate my wonderful sex drive into who I am while being free of its hold.

What strikes me today as I sit, still waiting for that tow truck in this riot of memories and chill and silence and even some subtle horny feelings, is how non-resistant I feel to them all. Nothing is in the way; these urges, feelings and memories just flow and flow. There’s much I cannot allow myself to feel, not that I can sense anyway. I doubt I could have welcomed all these urges and feelings quite as easily had I not confronted my own fear and shame and pain back then, and brought it out of my own hidings. And this non-resistance, this easiness with my once-secret pain, is precisely the same non-resistance that is part of the silence itself.

If we are to become free I don’t know any other way than to free ourselves from the grip of what is for us unspeakable, loosen the chains of our own desperation. And learn to laugh with it all.

Living thus effortlessly is what the Taoists call wu wei, effortless action. To be complete, such effortlessness must be wide armed enough to welcome all of our personalities, drives and scarred histories. It demands willingness, standing in the fire long enough to speak every last bit of truth, until its toxicity is pretty much burnt off. Only then will we be free in the face of our own forbidden emotions.

It’s a little like playing jazz. You become open, playful, ready to jam this way or that, and without serious limits.

All this took some damn good psychotherapeutic skills of Ken, my weekly rent-a-mom. But I can’t help but think that the silence itself, whispering its infinitesimal but steady and playful pull, also had something to do with it. Inner silence doesn’t drop into the weeds. But it holds a standard aloft—freedom, no effort whatsoever—and lends a sweetly quiet background tone to a life. It helps keep us going until we are absolutely easy. Be effortless, it says, be absolutely Wu Wei. Especially, where you hurt.

One mark of this Wu Wei ease around a painful life block is being able to laugh with it. Laughter is a kind of gauge, I think. I knew I was pretty well done with an issue—the ducks, the belt or the others—when I found myself laughing at it. My bet is that this is true for pretty much everyone, but hey, I’m Jewish. When you can’t laugh at your troubles or your beliefs or especially your own seriousness, there’s probably something that’s still got you.

Laughing with them says you’re way bigger than your tensions. Kidding around has simply got to be part of this!

Gallows humor doesn’t count: too bitter. Embarrassed giggling doesn’t count either if it means avoidance. Being able to sit with the ridiculous irony of it all is my marker: that you have to go through pain to feel ease, through ease to own your pain, and through both to grow up. How ridiculously ironic is all this?

Standing halfway between dirt and God is, after all, a pretty absurd place to put your sneakers.

A good belly laugh is wide open, when you think about it, navel to throat. To be open-throated like that, feels just the same as does the openness of the silence itself. Where you were hurting and small you get to be big and funny, and the vastness has spread her angel wings.

It and Dragons

I want to tell you one more story. I’m not sure if I want to tell it because it makes a hellova tale (well to me anyway), because it points to a whole other kind of integration that has got to be part of this, or just because it’s true. Probably all three.

This one happened a couple of years after I had pretty much worked through that nasty business with my mom. I was forty something by then and my first book, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, had just come out. The American Academy of Religion had scheduled a major panel about it for that fall’s conference. Dr. Katz and friends were slated to debate the book with me and mine. A friend mentioned with a bit too much concern that Katz said he was “gonna come gunning” for me.

When I first heard that line, I laughed it off as a scholar’s gun-slinging bluster. But I had encountered this man many times before, and I was afraid of his barbs and innuendoes. You’d have to be “bizarre” to think as I did, he’d once remarked.69 “Your footnotes are a mess,” he’d leveled at me at another conference.70

The upcoming meeting was important to me and my young career, and over the next few months I found myself getting more and more churned up. I kept hearing that phrase, “He’s gonna come gunning for you.” Even when the panel was still nine months away I was waking up in cold sweats!

One night in early April, still an amazing eight months before the conference, I again woke up in the middle of the night, drenched. “This is ridiculous!” I said to myself. I crawled out of bed, put on a robe, and padded out to the living room couch.

Shivering more from fear than cold, I pulled up a blanket. “OK, Bub,” I said to myself, “what are you really afraid of here?”

I drew a blank.

“Well, then,” I went on, “what’s likely to actually happen in New Orleans?”

The echo chamber of my fears switched on: he’ll say my argument about novelty is wrong…He’ll ridicule the claim that one does not think... He’ll feign wonder…He’ll find some inaccurate footnote …He’ll say it’s bizarre to think this or that.

This was not helping.

“OK, OK,” I asked myself, taking a deep breath, “beneath all that, what are you really afraid he’ll say?”

I didn’t know. But my breathing had gotten tighter. There was something here. “So tell the truth. What are you really afraid of here …?”

Another deep breath: “OK, if I tell myself the real truth, I’m afraid he’ll say ……”

“… that I’m stupid!”

This one had the thud of truth.

Long pause.

“Yeah, I’m scared he’ll say I am stupid.”

“Well,” I whispered tentatively to myself, “am I? Am I stupid?”

I wanted to leap to my own defense with “of course you’re not.” But I didn’t. After all those years of trying to prove how smart I am, after all my blustering in seminars that I am as quick as the next grad student, after all the A’s…here was the moment …

“Yeah,” I shuddered to myself, “I could be a lot smarter. If I was really smart it wouldn’t have taken me nearly so long to see what he was saying and to write my books. I bet I could have done this a whole lot faster! And I know my arguments could be even stronger. I wish I was a whole lot smarter. So yeah, truth be told, I am stupid.”

It was obvious. My breathing loosened a notch, my shoulders let go some. There was indeed something here.

“Well,” I went on “I’ll bet he’ll find some wrong page numbers in some of my footnotes. Maybe he’ll say my footnotes are sloppy.”

“OK,” I wondered, “will he be right? Are my footnotes sloppy?”

Again, I didn’t particularly want to think this thought. I had tried to get all those notes right, God knows. I’d worked my ass off to get those damn ducks in a row. I’ve tried to make them perfect. But those ducks did seem to wander off.

“Yeah,” I said to myself, “I probably screwed up some of those notes. If he says I’m sloppy, I’d have to say, he’ll probably be right! I don’t have all my ducks in a row.”

Even just admitting these things to myself was downright embarrassing. But here it was, the plain old truth. Here was what I was afraid of, stark naked.

“Maybe he’ll say that I’m aggressive…

“Well, would he be right?” I asked myself. “Am I aggressive?”

This one was actually harder to face. Ever since I could remember I had felt like a victim—of my mother, of my sister, of Proudfoot, now of Katz. I’d built a life around being a victim, and I was staring it in the face. But here it was: maybe I was not just a victim in all this.

I let out another breath, slowly. “You know, now that I think of it, I actually am kind of aggressive. Look how I’ve handled poor Katz. I’ve probably taken him on in a dozen articles; now a whole book. To him I must seem a damn bulldog! So yeah, I am aggressive. I actually am something of a son of a bitch.”

I actually smiled at that one. Maybe I wasn’t as much of a wimp and as I’d thought!

For the next half hour, I told myself every scary truth about me I could think of. That I write poorly. That I’d used him to advance my career. That I had co-opted other people’s ideas. That I had treated him and his colleagues poorly. Even that I was balding.

I didn’t like to think any of these. But the truth was, every nasty thought was in some very real sense true.

At some point I had whispered to myself every dirty, nasty, embarrassing secret I could think of. I had run out of fibs.

At just that moment I looked up. Standing across the room was a huge pot-bellied dragon. Honest to goodness! Green, scaly, slimy, fire-spewing from his nose: a dragon! I could even smell sulfur. And his face was unmistakably, hysterically, Steven Katz’s!

Now, I’m not given to apparitions. But this big old pot bellied dragon was so perfect that I laughed right out loud. Katz clearly was my dragon. He was dangerous as hell for me. Like St. George I had taken him on. I had made him angry. And I had to slay him.

One thing that made me really chuckle was his pot belly. Katz himself had something of a belly.

Funnily enough, I thought to myself, so do I.

Katz is Jewish, I also saw. And hey, so am I.

He had always seemed pretty aggressive to me. And here I’d just acknowledged how aggressive I was too.

He’s a scholar. So am I.

He’s smart. So am I.

He edits books, like me. We even both publish with Oxford Press!

And he probably wishes he was smarter…um, just like me.

And there it was. In all the ways I didn’t want to think about myself, we were alike. Two Jewish, pot bellied, fire breathing sons of bitches. Katz, my great sulfur spewing dragon, this big old fellow with whom I’d been fighting tooth and nail all these years, was me.

He wasn’t the one who was spewing venom. It was me. And I am the one with the pot belly!

What I was really afraid of was all the truths about me I couldn’t face. That I am aggressive. That I am an angry Jew. That I am a fire-spewing dragon.

It wasn’t Katz that I’d been so afraid all these years. It was me!

I’m the bloody dragon,” I said out loud.

The very moment I said that sentence to myself, that big, old, slimy, fire-breathing dragon went zloooop—like some cartoon character spiraling down a drain—right into my belly. “I’m the effen’ dragon” I laughed aloud again. “I’m the one I’ve been running from!”

I laughed and I cried with the delicious irony of it all! What a bloody hoot!

I got up and danced like some mad Zorba over to where the dragon had been spewing fire. “How perfectly obvious! I am stupid! I am dumb! My footnotes are a mess! I’m the aggressive SOB. Hodee ho dee ho dee ho!”

No more would I have to run. No more would I have anything to be afraid of. Because no matter what he could think up to say about me—was all true!

It actually worked. Never again did I wake up in a cold sweat. Never again did I obsess about Katz, or about any scholar for that matter. Not once.

Oh, I still worked hard to write my arguments and prepare my articles. But the crazy energy, the obsessional echo chamber, simply wasn’t any more. St. George had slain his dragon. Which was, of course, St. George.

The November panel in New Orleans turned out to actually be a big deal. The Shootout at the Mystical OK Corral had gotten quite a bit of attention. The room for 150 was overflowing out the double doors; all the biggest names in the field were there. Katz and his mates sat on one side of the podium, Nick Perovich and I from The Problem of Pure Consciousness on the other. Everything but the Colt Forty-fives.

He made his points well. But Katz in the flesh wasn’t nearly as scary as my dragon had been. When my turn came I offered an analogy. Imagine several rocket ships, each constructed in a different country, in that country’s language, of course. Each is affected or shaped by its local culture. But as it leaves earth, each leaves the gravitational pull of its homeland. Like that mystical experiences are the result of someone using language to go beyond their cultural formation, and goes beyond linguistic construction. Each comes to the same unconstructed weightlessness. Different cultures, different language systems, yet all leave the pull of their homeland and come to the same silent, common weightless vastness of space.

Virtually every single question that afternoon was directed at Katz’s side of the panel and took off from my rocket ships and weightlessness image. Our new approach was taking hold.

At the end of the event, Ewert Cousins, a well regarded Fordham Professor of spiritual experience, came up to me, beaming. “Congratulations!” he enthused.

“What for” I asked him?

“At this point,” he said, “the field is different. Before today,” he went on with a wizened smile, “there was only one acceptable approach to the study of mysticism. Now there are two.”

Turns out he was right. Since that day every academic article about a mystic I’ve seen has begun with an explanation of why the author thinks that the subject’s experiences are or are not linguistically constructed or why their cause is or is not in some culturally transcendent source.

This general Katz-Forman debate has by now come to involve hundreds of scholars around the world.”71 I can’t help but believe that that dragon zlooping into my belly, and the success of that New Orleans panel, had something to do with it.

The stakes were terribly high for me that day. I was a mere junior scholar, just out of graduate school. A gaff or even a misplaced cynicism could have decimated my young reputation and derailed the whole debate. But I was there, focused, with nary a dragon nor fear in sight. There were no walls over against Dr. Katz that day, little armor. I felt only easiness there with my old dragon. For there was no accusation he could level at me that I hadn’t already acknowledged to be true.72

God knows I still lie to myself some. I still get nervous about success and failure. I still have truths I can’t yet see and issues I don’t want to acknowledge. I doubt that we ever get done with shadows.

Nonetheless I can’t imagine doing what I do or even sitting here this afternoon quite so undefensively if I was still hiding from too many big truths about myself. If I was still needing to prove how smart I was, if I was still trying to duck my anger, if I was still trying to convince myself that I am right or virtuous or a victim, it would simply be harder to be.

Where we are keeping secrets from ourselves, we have to work hard to not see them. We just can’t be loose there, can’t possibly play effortlessly. The fear of those very truths and the pain that is hiding from them grips us, holds us back. All that effort to not know becomes part of us, part of our personas, and holds us down into the mundane. Our secrets become our chains into the world.

But bringing all those truths we hide from ourselves into awareness frees us up a good bit. I became towards my dragon and towards what I couldn’t allow myself to know precisely as easy as is the silence itself.

It’s like we find the ease that is silence in owning our truth. I suppose this is what they mean by the truth will set you free.

I can’t help but think that the silence helped me with my dragon that night. Its power was neither obvious nor immediate. But its candle-flame of warmth probably made it just a little easier to venture that next tentative step.

No matter how clearly we know or sense it, the very effortless of silence invites us to that very effortlessness in all things, and it is far easier to acknowledge what is so than to deny it. The Vastness issues a challenge: “Tell the truth. Tell it so completely that there is nothing left to be afraid of. Tell it so thoroughly that there is no room for hidden lies. Tell it so completely that you become effortless.”

Silence beckons, ever so slightly, always towards honesty. It challenges us to let go of every lie we tell ourselves. It calls us to conceal nothing, to keep no secrets from ourselves. And then it beckons some more.

“Don’t give up,” it whispers. “Don’t stop until you’re entirely open. No kidding, don’t quit.”

That we can have a good belly laugh even when we cry, that we can stare at the scary old truth effortlessly, even when it’s embarrassing, that we can do all these at once, is one hell of an invitation.

Enlightenment, the great unmingling of the trans-personal reality from the personal, is not the same as enlightenment into a trans and personal reality. But it is this, I think, that we are — or should be — after today. It is enlightenment plus. It includes both the effortlessness of inner silence and the ability to jam with abandon, anywhere, everywhere.

I call it “Enlightenment Plus.” The plus happens in our everyday life: Jazz in the Soul.

Jazz in the Soul has something to do with fluidity. It’s being so effortless that we can jam effortlessly from painful to serious to laughter to fear to silence and then back again. There are no walls in such a life, no inner resistances. Soul Jazz means you can sink into your own fear and joy and sexiness and vastness and then pop back out again. All in the key of life.

I know no one who lives Enlightenment Plus in every corner of their lives. It is an asymptote. But it’s the right asymptote.