in the World in the WorldMy life has been punctuated with meditation retreats. Maharishi used to describe meditative growth as like dipping a cloth into the dye, then exposing it to the sun, thus slowly making the color fast. I’m not sure if the dyeing happens between my retreats or during, but some of the color does seem to have gotten a little faster over the years.
In 1997, some three years after that drive from Crestone down to Denver, I took a retreat in the deciduously forested Lynwood Retreat Center in upstate New York. After two days of catching up on sleep, always needed, I began to feel this strangely insistent sensation that I was as if a pyramid or mountain; my crossed legs were its base and my head its summit.
I don’t usually get images in meditation, certainly not in one meditation after another like that. But this odd sensation was growing more insistent day by day. It was like being the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill.
After several days I began to feel an intense energy focusing in my forehead, as if a dozen spotlights were aiming from within at my “third eye.” And after a few more days, these sensations suddenly disappeared.
My attention now shifted higher up, to just above my head. I could feel something like a yellow or gold Mohawk up there, more like a sensation of light or energy than of hair. Actually I’m not sure I should call it a sensation. Though it was as much a part of me as is my left hand, it was above my skull, beyond the limits of my skin.
This Mohawk thing also lasted for several days. I went over what little I knew about the sixth and seventh chakras, which according to Hinduism are respectively in the forehead and atop the head. What I had been feeling was similar, but in neither case were these “sensations” what I might have expected.
The 6th chakra is said to be mid-forehead, radiating outwards from the third eye. But here the radiation was coming from within, and pointing inside my skull. And what was this weird mountain sensation?
The crown or 7th chakra sits atop the skull. But it is generally pictured as a lotus, which is bowl shaped. This long, narrow Mohawk sensation didn’t quite fit. (Perhaps traditional depictions are more like generic portraits, and different physiologies might give rise to different particulars.) Whatever this was, it was quite mythic.
All very beseeching. But what really got me was the drive home. I took the scenic route down the Taconic. I’d been driving perhaps half an hour when once again something seemed weird in how I was seeing. I’d gotten used to these drives by then, so I pulled the car over to get a fix on it, leaving the radio on and the engine rumbling idly.
In front of me was a small, nearly square reflective green sign, bolted neatly atop its three foot pole with 45/7 printed on it in reflective Helvetica. A mile marker, I figured, 45.7 miles from wherever the Taconic begins.
As I looked at it, something seemed odd. Whatever this strange sense was, it wasn’t like that cloud in Colorado ... No, not in my peripheral vision, I thought ... No, this one has something to do with how I am looking ... something is weird about how I am seeing this mile marker …
And suddenly I knew. For the first time in my life, I was what I was seeing. I was that mile marker.
Every “it” I’d ever looked at had always been “over there.” I had been “over here.” Whatever I saw, tasted or touched always had been, as the existentialist philosophers describe it, “over-against” me. Always that existential split — I/you, me/it — and a felt wall in between. Every single thing I had ever encountered had been “other.”
But not that unassuming little mile marker. There was no boundary between me and it, no “over against,” no “other.”
Or to describe it from the other side, I was not pulling away inside, even a smidgeon, from it. Nor, as I looked around, was I pulling away from the forest … or from the stream below the road … or from the bluegrass on the radio. Nothing was other. I couldn’t sense any separation anywhere.
I noticed a Yellow Shafted Flicker clinging to an oak tree behind the little sign. I watched him beat-beat-glide his way down to the ground and start pecking. I wasn’t resisting him in the way I always had. Even though he was a different being, I wasn’t afraid of him even subtly, as I would have been. Nothing inside was pulling away. Though I could still judge feet and inches — he was about 20 feet away — there was no felt distance from him. It was as if my skin had become porous.104
I flashed back to that experience of the cloud in the Colorado valleys. In comparison, this being with the Flicker and the mile marker seemed … well … ordinary. No great expanse, no exciting interpenetration. No photogenic cloud. This seemed rather plain, actually, down to earth. I just wasn’t pulling back. I was just being with.
Perhaps this very ordinariness is part of why this new relationship, or non-relationship, has remained with me ever since. Never again have I experienced that old feeling of distance or that sense of “otherness” towards things. If anything, the non-resistance to the external world has only become more obvious.
Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t used to be any more antagonistic to the world or other people than the next fellow. We probably all pull back just the teeniest bit from the world—with the slightest hint of defense or protection. I believe that how I used to be in the world is pretty standard.
It’s quite necessary. We need to build boundaries, God knows. Even as tiny babies we have to construct our sense of a separate self. We need to know where we stop and our mom or the crib begins. Without learning these simple lessons we could never build a sense of an I, never learn that we are separate from our parents or other kids, never know ourselves to be autonomous. And God forbid that we should not create boundaries with a smothering mother or some abusive boyfriend! No, it’s very important to have edges.
But if you’re reading this book, you’ve probably learned this lesson pretty well. You probably know by now where you end and the world begins. (Except, of course, for the inevitable boundary confusions we all have with our spouses!)
I created my borders, I could see as I compared it with this new sense, with a subtle kind of internal pushing away. It’s like inside I held up my hand, just a little, with a felt-sense of “stop right there, buster!” I never realized that I was doing it, of course. I can’t imagine how I could have. But I was resisting ever so slightly inside. And towards absolutely everything. I was, “Come thou no closer.”
I had been holding every bird, every glass of water and every waving branch with the same kind of psychic distancing as I did the most intrusive parent or dangerous thug.
But over against that Yellow Shafted Flicker, over against that mile marker, there was no upraised hand, not even a finger.
We probably don’t need to work so hard all the time to maintain our boundaries like we do. That Flicker was awfully small; it really wasn’t much of a danger to me. And mile markers truly are harmless. Really, we don’t need to protect ourselves against every bird, every mile marker and every piece of music, do we?
Since that day, resisting far less, it’s become a little easier just to be. At some deep existential level I’m no longer holding things at bay. Birds, cranberry bread, everyone I meet, even the wind—the world just has fewer boundaries now.
Perhaps this is why just now I can feel the breeze in my chest so clearly and the snowy maple branches across the back of my shoulders. For I am in the trees outside the window in a way I couldn’t have imagined, and the woods have found their way into my little hermitage.
I think we all have one or two core life problems: being seen, gaining love, finding a life passion or focus in an over-busy life, gaining respect. Mine is neatly put in a line from the Gita:
Do the duty (dharma) to which you are called, oh Arjuna, Indifferent to success and failure.105
Becoming “indifferent to success and failure” isn’t everyone’s core problem, but it’s been one of mine. (At this stage, it’s pretty clear that there’s little relationship between spiritual and material success. But hey, you have to learn this somehow.)
In the upper middle class Jewish suburb in which I came of age, I heard endless paeans of success: “he’s a successful Doctor now,” “… he graduated summa from law school and now…” “made a fortune in real estate.” To be a success was to be worthwhile. My folks, my friends, my teachers and above all I bought the narrative. “Successful” “wealthy,” “famous” was roughly equivalent to “yeah! good guy!” It was never “be the best you can be” or “be the authentic you,” or “love and be loved.” Just “be the best,” “be a success,” “earn a lot.” You know, “the guy with the biggest bankbook when he dies wins.”
So when, in late 2004, The Forge Institute that I had founded was losing members, people were bellyaching and many of our volunteers had lost their enthusiasm, I was staring — embarrassed, scared and ashamed — into the maw.
I made excuses, of course. “Not my fault.” “We’re ahead of our times.” “Got bad advice.” “Underfunded.”
All true. And all irrelevant. All I knew was I was falling apart.
So one September afternoon I said to myself “I’ve got to get a handle on this!” and started walking, glum but determined, up the hill to nearby Draper Park. I found a peeling park bench as far from the people and dogs as I could, with a view of the Palisades and the expansive mouth of the Hudson River. I asked myself,
“Ok, what’s going on here Bob?” Instantly, terror.
It took awhile to settle down. But I’d been here before. So I turned around inside and asked myself, “OK, kid. Just what’s so scary about all this? Is there some truth you’re not willing to tell yourself here?”
The answer was obvious. I just didn’t want to say it. I was failing.
So I whispered it to myself, barely audible above the breeze: “What I don’t want to say is, I am failing.” My belly clenched. I wanted to run away. There was clearly gold here.
So I said it again, still half whispering: “I am failing.” The very words I least wanted to say.
“I am failing,” I said, again, still afraid.
Honestly to say this aloud felt like breaking some sort of law. I cannot fail. We must not fail. And if we do, we are never to acknowledge it. Failure is forbidden.
So I said it again, “I am failing.”
I could see my mother in the dining room, turning away. I saw my father at his desk, waving me away with a mere puff and a wave of the hand. In each image I was left alone, ignored, falling, in some sort of chasm.
I stayed on that bench for nearly an hour, failing.
Over the next few afternoons I wandered up to that park bench. I’d feel the breeze. I’d look out over the expansive Hudson. I’d recite my new mantra—“I am failing.” And I’d feel like crying.
Looking out over that wide, wide river, I began to feel as if I was on it, floating face up in its great grey characterless breadth. Some ancient dread was here: of being a tiny bauble, afloat, nowhere in particular, lost utterly. I was a speck in an enormous ocean, alone.
“I am failing…I am failing”
To fail in our culture is to disappear, to be nothing in a sea of nothing, to fade away, utterly and without a trace. As Clapton put it, “nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”106 The failed do not exist. And they never did.
“I am failing, failing.”
Facing abandonment for those weeks, floating meaninglessly in a grey and characterless sea was the loneliest experience I have ever had. No islands, no place to stand or to plant your flag. Just lost, directionless, disappeared, alone. Utterly alone.
I had been running from this sinking lostness all my life. It was behind my drive for A’s in school, behind every seductive come-on, behind all that craving for the approval of Professor Brereton, Professor Proudfoot, and all of them. It was behind every anxious ambition, behind every drive for fame and every silly thing I said to get noticed. It was craving to be, a need to plant a flag in the place-lessness at the core of my life. It was a craving to exist.
“I am failing.”
This wasn’t about what had actually happened in my life. I had not been a total failure; I knew that. I’d earned a Ph.D, published ten books, started a journal and a non profit, brought value into the world. Now, this wasn’t about overt accomplishments. This was about what had been behind all those cravings: this existential fear, the terror of not existing. I was about one year old, perhaps, left outside crying too long, nobody noticing. It was about being left alone, forgotten, unseen. Whatever it was, this was deep and ancient and unquenchable.
Every afternoon for nearly two weeks I trudged up to that park. I’d sit on my peeling park bench, look out over the wide, wide Hudson, and fail. It was as painful and lonely and abandoned as anything I’d ever faced. Yet it felt somehow important. Alone, awake, I’d disappear into an endless sea of loneliness.
I had not been running from failure. I had been running from not existing.
After perhaps two and a half weeks, I walked up that hill, planted myself on my bench, looked out over the Hudson and said my mantra, “I am failing.” And…nothing.
I said it louder, “I am failing.” No sinking dread. No bitter taste.
I yelled it: “You’re a god-damned failure!”
All I felt was a cool breeze coming up from the Hudson. I watched tiny ripples vee out from a tug slowly pulling a barge up the river. And I went home.
I don’t know how we human beings can ever become complete without spreading our arms wide to the very pain from which we have run from all our lives.
That which haunts us will always find a way out.
That wound will not heal unless given witness.
The shadow that follows us in the way in.
Rumi
I know no better way to give such witness than to sit on a park bench, alone, patient, eyes wide open, staring into the maw of the very truth that most terrorizes us. It was only when I faced my dread of not existing without flinching that I came to see and to own my lifelong desperation. And not the other way around.
But the emotional neutrality I found is its own kind of gift. There is a peace in neutrality you don’t expect. When you have stared straight into the frightening maw of your great fear, what you get is … well, life. You just go about living. There’s an understated ease in such neutrality. It’s not ecstasy, it’s not bliss. Nor is it nothing.
About three months later, we held one of our bi-weekly Forge Hearths, our small group for mutual deepening. Only Persephone and DeAnne had come. “Two people,” I thought to myself. “It’s clearly too small. Why aren’t they flocking to this in droves?”
But that habitual self-flagellation didn’t really resonate. What I found myself noticing was that these two women were doing such good work.
“You know what I haven’t been admitting to myself…?”
“I think what I’ve been withholding from Steven is …”
“You know, listening to you, I think I’ve been lying to David as well…”
It wasn’t me, of course. These wonderful women were doing the letting go. But I was their facilitator, friend and mentor. And I was helping.
“This isn’t flashy work,” I said to myself. “It’s not generating millions. I’m not getting famous. But I’m helping these two good people. And they’re helping me too. It is good to be here tonight.”
Becoming free of what has haunted you is a good thing. It’s not good because you’re succeeding or getting famous or answering your childhood longings. It’s not good because Dad approves. It’s just good to mature and transform and to grow in love and self-honesty.
Helping people find themselves or deepen with one another has always been the point of my work. But that was the first evening in which I was satisfied only because I was helping. And that sad old demon—the one that needed success or approval or to exist—just wasn’t in the room that night.
Success is an if/then statement. If I become famous then people will really love me. If I get rich then I’ll really be OK. And it’s always about tomorrow: ah, then they’ll really see me!
That evening though there was no tomorrow. There was only Persephone, DeAnne and me. There was nothing fancy to come. There was nothing scary to be afraid of. Just us, doing the work, quietly becoming more open, together.
Today, some five years later, writing these recollections in my little hermitage, I still watch myself flip occasionally into some future-fantasy. This book will be a hit; people will think I was heroic to come here, I’ll be admired. Deep longings like these fade slowly.
But then I catch myself and I give a little chuckle, “Ha, there you go again!” And then I say, “nah, not today fellah. Come back, here, now.” I didn’t used to be able to do this.
I was half expecting that if you found your “appointed duty” or answered your cosmic dharma, then all those old cravings would suddenly vanish, as if you’d turned off a switch. Maharishi made it sound so easy.
Here I was pretty sure that I had indeed found my dharma, my real calling. But being able to do my appointed duty while “indifferent to success and failure” has come more slowly, more organically. I topple unexpectedly into some future fantasy. I catch myself. It happens again. I catch myself again. Sometimes I laugh at myself. And maybe, just maybe, I do so less and catch myself a tad quicker.
To learn how to be a human being enmeshed in permanent silence is, as the Nicene Creed has it, to learn how to be “fully God and fully man.” It is to learn to be silent and noisy, wrestling with ancient demons and be spacious. It is to live in the soul, one foot in the great cosmic infinite and the other in the leftovers from imperfect parents, half-formed siblings and childish friends, not to mention our own troubled histories. And silence cures some of our dysfunctions, but only some. Curing a life, in my case becoming truly “indifferent to success and failure” (or whatever is our life issue) is where this all gets lived.
Just at this moment I’m feeling pretty free of the good or ill fantasy. I am without tomorrow or yesterday, without success, without failure. What I feel is actually quite simple, almost flat. I just make the toast or write these words or pad over to my meditation perch. There are no accolades here, no hopes, no longings. And no failing. It all feels so … so … normal!
About two years later one last jigsaw piece clicked into place. Another ten day retreat, here in upstate NY, during a muggy late August, 2000. I noticed during one afternoon meditation that that my breathing had become, just for a few seconds, utterly effortless. All those tiny throat tightenings, the small catches in the breath that you barely notice, had suddenly disappeared. For four or maybe five breaths, my breathing machinery was utterly frictionless.
Again, you don’t notice consistent patterns like these till they fade away. But up until those few seconds, every breath had been, ever so slightly, balky: a pause here, a catch there, something opening only halfway. It had all been very faint, barely noticed, but constant. Here though, for just a few seconds, it took no effort to breathe. None. Breathe in. Breathe out. It was that easy.
Over the next few days it happened a few more times. I’d notice that the muscles behind my ears would relax, my jaw would let down ever so slightly, and my whole breathing apparatus would again become smooth. I even took a few breaths that way during a walk. It felt quite sweet, actually. It was easier than usual just to be.
Breathing with no resistance whatsoever was remarkable, if something so normal can be said to be remarkable. It’s as if nothing at all was stopping me from the inside and nothing from the outside. So I just breathed, with no hesitation whatsoever.
Breathing on a walk without a hair of resistance, came to feel that I was inhaling the trees, the hills, the stones on the driveway. I was as if I was sucking the trees and clouds sky deep into my lungs. I seemed to have become some great world devouring maw. I felt frankly like I was yawning in the world.
This yawning thing happened a few more times on that retreat.
Every time I went on retreat over the next few years, and for longer and longer periods, it would happen again. The muscles inside my ears would relax, the sides towards the back of my throat would open, and my breathing would become again utterly liquid. It stayed for longer periods on my walks or even sometimes in my hermitage. I seemed to be inhaling the world, more and more often, into some great emptiness. It’s a strange feeling, yawning in trees, stones, seed pods, like you’re huge and growing larger.
This happened only on meditation retreats for the next four or five years. Then one day, back in New York, walking by Madison Square Garden on 8th Ave, I realized that I was breathing that way again. The cracks on the sidewalk, the bodega’s colorful fruit, the taxicabs speeding down 8th — I was inhaling them all in, like some great urban vacuum.
This strangely easy way of being has stayed with me most of the time since then. I don’t think about my breathing much, but when I pay attention, it’s still frictionless. Though it’s less of a striking difference than some of the other shifts, I suppose I’d have to say this too has become permanent.
This, and the lack of separation from what I see, is I suspect, the real unity consciousness the mystics they talk about. It is deep and real. What I didn’t expect is how ordinary it has come to seem.
It’s quite different from what I expected and from how many spiritual teachers describe such mystical unity, or what Evelyn Underwood called “The Prayer of Union.107” It’s not that I have no defensiveness. I like to think I’m less defensive than I used to be, but I still get emotionally defended sometimes, even while breathing in the world. If someone gets very aggressive with me or if I feel like I haven’t been heard, my emotional machinery may still click into protective mode. Unity consciousness is, again, not a personality transplant.
The odd thing is that even when I get defensive, this sense of non resistant unity, this sense of breathing in the world or the other person, remains. It lives somehow beneath my feelings and my self-protective instincts. But it’s there. I can be emotionally defensive yet existentially non-resistant. Not quite the “we are the world” that we expected, huh?
Now, would you allow me a moment to rant? (if not, skip this paragraph) Recently I heard some self help guru (who will remain nameless) encourage her audience to “try to experience the oneness of all things.” I find that terribly misleading, even a little silly. To pretend that you feel connected may work for a few minutes, but it’s a thought of connection, not an existential connection. The problem is not only that it’s imagined, a chimera, but it may lead to denying real feelings of separation or real feelings. And it reveals a deep misunderstanding. Unity consciousness is not an emotion. It is not something we can think up or make ourselves feel. It is a real shift in the relationship between consciousness and its objects. Consciousness comes to perceive itself—without effort—as none other than its contents. It comes at a level beneath trying, beneath imagining, beneath even the idea of oneness. Such a change is deep, structural and important, not something we think or pretend or try to make happen. It may lead, indirectly, to some personality or attitude changes. But these are the result of the structural shift, not the other way round. Please, let’s not imitate or pretend some mood of oneness, but rather work to shift ourselves into the real thing.
Ok, thanks. I’m done now.
Now, back to it. It’s now been five years since that breathing shift. It’s rare to feel one of those breath-shudders or throat-catches that used to be so common. Nor have I felt that muscle behind my ears let go for a long time now. I’ve lost the surprising feeling of yawning the world in, which probably had to do with the newness of this sort of breathing. The unity with what I see and the non-resistant breathing has become second nature, I suppose. So that just now the trees, the snow sparkling outside my window and the stove rumbling alongside me are all somehow welcome inside me, in my body, in my lungs, far more viscerally and comfortably than was even that road sign or Flicker. My breathing, the world and the shimmering snow now seem like some vast connective tissue. The snow showering off the branches and glittering on the pods are here, inside the hermitage, deep inside my pectoral muscles.
It’s hard to remember how hard the world used to be. But I’m sure it’s easier now. The world has become kindly, as if I’m being held. Even the plaster walls across the room seem softer somehow. The room, the wind and the snowy pods outside have become buttery.
Maybe this is just the mellowing of age. Maybe everyone feels similarly by 60. Perhaps all the meditation and therapy and reflection these past 40 years have just helped me relinquish the worst of the fears and terrors with which I came of age. Or maybe I started out with more of a deficit than most, and all I’ve done is to take a particularly long route to “normal.”
But I doubt it. Somehow knowing the trees in my belly and experiencing the softness of plaster walls seems like an unusually generous gift. Maybe this is what is given to people who spend their lives relinquishing the fears and the smallnesses of their youth enough to see, just a little more clearly, how things actually are.
Years of meditation and self reflection and retreats don’t make us rich and they don’t make us famous. But they may help us face the illusions of our ancient terrors. And when we do, when we can finally drop those hands that we’ve been holding up against the world, when we are finally able to relax into the simple presence of being from which we have been running all our lives, what seems to come is a world that feels like a kiss.
This too seems to be a piece, and an important one, of today’s complete spiritual goal. To live in a world that is no longer so over-against us, no longer so threatening, to experience the deep and unspeakable connection that lives below our thoughts and our feelings, is I think, to live closer to what is deeply so.