I wake up this morning at 7. I am surprised by the chill on my face. The hermitage needs heat. I dress and go downstairs, carrying the notes I scribbled half asleep last night. I put in kindling and blow on the embers. The first flames burst up, sudden and orange. I keep puffing. Flames disappear and rise up, disappear and rise up. I pull up the chair, watch the yellow light lick higher and higher behind sooty glass, and feel the first heat wafting from the open stove door. I fill the kettle and put it on the stove—it’ll be hot after I meditate. I pad into the back room, settle down on my violet backjack, and wrap the blanket cozily up to my neck. I look outside to see how much snow fell last night, close my eyes and begin dropping down inside, legs out, legs crossed. My breathing slows…
An hour later I blink open my eyes. I get up creakily; my back is stiff from sitting so long. I pad back over to the stove. The water is boiling now; I spoon in tea leaves. I fish my cup out of the dish drainer, pour in the tea, now steeped, add cream and sugar. The tea washes down my throat, sweet and rich, my morning cup of lifeblood.
Steaming cup in hand, I settle into my writing chair. The pages I brought downstairs from last night are here, so I type them up. I listen for the burbling of barely sensed feelings, and I type them into these words.
Two hours later, my stomach hints. It’s time for eggs, more tea, and some fried bread. I cook. I sit in front of the window to eat, and watch gray clouds tumbling over the fields. This leads to boots and coat for a walk down by Patch and Lil Girl’s place, who come loping…
There are no transitions here. It’s like I never have to stop. I do what is next, and then next, and then next, each step an invitation to the next.
What I feel mostly is non-resistance. There is nothing over-against the walls across the room, nothing between me and the trees outside, nothing resisting the burbles of felt-thoughts. It is as if the answers I seek, these very words in fact, were written long ago, and it has taken me all these years to quiet down enough to hear them.
It is like being pushed from behind.
Anxiety is here too, I see, in the back of my throat, just beneath the surface of my mind. I’m a little worried that my car might slip down the hill when I go for groceries tomorrow or that I’ve disappeared off the social grid. Something.
Yes anxiety, my old friend, is here. But mostly what I’m aware of is the uprightness I feel just now. It’s as if my feet are planted especially firmly on the floor. I could swear I’m sitting taller.
When silence first dawned behind my neck it was a novelty. I was utterly enchanted with it. I read and I listened and I paid attention and I made sense of it in every way I could. I watched it saturate itself over the years into my head and body and then out through my shoulders and torso and into the world. Eventually I gave up on making easy sense of this strange otherness, and I learned to live out of it as opposed to the other way round. And slowly my life has fallen more and more into its thrall. I suppose that’s all we can do when something like this dawns, come to terms with the gift we could not possibly have expected, and learn to live into its rhythm.
In the understated and natural way these things probably always happen, there has been a calling here. It has grown more slowly and more humbly than I would have guessed, as if through a back door. Yet in my own analytical and halting way, I have been learning what it means to serve it. Making tea, walking the dogs, feeling the periodic anxieties, writing these words, somehow all feel like the manifestation of this dropping down and out that has become the fulcrum of my life.
I wouldn’t say I’m glad exactly. My life would have been much more straightforward (and probably wealthier) had it been baseball or racing cars or boxes of Styrofoam cups that became my life’s work. But this has been mine. And it has the virtue of being, just possibly, real.
I am noticing that old sleepy drooping in my forehead again. It is time to stop. I’ll put another log in the stove, pad over to my violet meditation perch and pull the blanket up to my neck cozily. Then I’ll close my eyes, legs out, legs crossed, and drop in and down and …
I am looking forward to walking up the stone path to my house in a few days. I’m looking forward to a gloriously hard shower and to Yvonne’s coming through the door. I feel a little mournful about leaving the smooth elegance I have found here, though I’m ready to finally let out my breath after maintaining the precision it takes to be in a place like this.
What I’ve discovered here is solitude, not loneliness. They are very different. There’s a roundness to solitude, a completeness. Solitude is soft, cozy even. I find it comforting.
Loneliness is sharper, an arrow in the belly. When I first arrived here the loneliness was very sharp. I was afraid and I felt very alone. When my car hung over the icy ditch two weeks later, I felt it again.
Interestingly, both times I felt lonely, I was afraid: of freezing, of failing, of doing damage to my car. I wanted Yvonne — or someone — to swoop in and take care of everything.
There’s always a longing in loneliness, I suspect. You pine — for someplace soft, for comfort, for someone to save you — for something. Loneliness always longs. It longs for tomorrow, for someplace or someone far away. Loneliness lives in the not now, not here.
I was carrying awful bucketfuls of loneliness in my twenties. All the unresolved crud from childhood, all the leftover rage. I was afraid all the time, scared I’d never land a career, scared I’d never have a real friend or find love. In the face of such fear I also longed for someplace not here, someplace far away. I could have longed for fame or love or martyrdom I suppose. But what I longed for was enlightenment. Moks.a would be a different life, faraway, the perfect life with a sharper mind and a healthier body, more loving relationships and, yes, thicker hair. It was my better tomorrow, the answer. And I wanted it bad. Enlightenment was not this, not here. Enlightenment was “it will be better.”
Oh, I’d heard Maharishi talk endlessly about “cosmic consciousness,” the first stage of enlightenment. I had heard tell that when you shift your state of consciousness and live the great silence, you would witness your thoughts and feelings. I studied the video tapes and memorized the phrases until I could recite the descriptions by heart.
But what I heard, really groked in my gut, had little to do with some shift in the relationship between consciousness and its objects. What I heard, and longed for deep in my bones, was that magical shift, that different life, that tomorrow far away. What I longed for was a shift so sweeping that all my troubles would just melt away, and I would be finally, really, happy.
With needs as intense as mine, I suppose, I would have pined with the same intensity no matter what I wanted. Had I continued with the guitar, maybe I would have dreamt of adoring crowds. I would have longed for a governor’s mansion had I gone into politics. Had I been a medieval Catholic, perhaps I would have yearned to be the most moral, or the most helpful, or maybe even a revered martyr. My longings were that intense.
But when that humble silence planted itself in my life, when I got the pot of gold for which I had craved, it wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be. It was not at all instant perfection. No wonder I became so confused and disillusioned! How could I possibly make sense of the terrible fact that, even with the much vaunted silence in my soul as permanently as my own heartbeat, I was still just a hurt and scared little boy?
Had I longed a different longing, the outcome would probably have been the same, give or take. Had I worked hard in the paper business and gotten rich, I probably would have found myself disappointed and confused at 40 about why, “even with all this money,” I still wasn’t happy. Had I become a physicist or a woodworker, I suspect, it would have been the same story, different tool set.
We come into the world broken. We choose our path and slowly fix our souls, more or less, and we try to become more complete. Musicians, businessmen, wives, ministers, prostitutes, botanists and spiritual teachers are all on a similar journeys, I think, all growing beyond the limitations of their youth, all in their way.
It is the path of the hero I have been pursuing. The way of meditation and reflection has been my path to overcome narrowness and to find rebirth. We all fight our demons, I suppose, whether it be with swords or guns or paint or film. We each seek our grail in our own way. The spiritual and meditative way is just one way, my way, to become whole.
And yet … this seems to miss something. The spiritual life, for all our confusions and our foolish intimations of superiority, the life of ongoing self examination and a commitment to the fully free life may actually be different.
Had I stayed a businessman or become a musician, for example, I would no doubt have been ambitious and worked hard to develop my craft. I would have grown personally a good bit, no doubt. But I would probably never have known quite why I was still so unhappy or what, fundamentally, to do about it. I might have gone to a psychotherapist or found my way to a spiritual workshop run by someone like me, and I would no doubt have made slow, incremental progress. But the inner work of becoming truly free at every level would have always remained an interesting but dubious sideline to my “real” work: the paper or music or teaching business.
Yes, people grow up in every lifestyle. But a serious and lifelong spiritual commitment brings an unexpected overplus, I think. Unlike the paper business or the pilot’s life, the whole point of the spiritual path is to self-reflect and to let go of everything, anything, to which we cling. “Let go of where you entrap yourself,” it whispers. “Good. Now let go even more. … Now do it again.”
The spiritual life may be the only life which is explicitly about facing and then relinquishing every illusion that has enchained us. Including itself. Unlike the search for money, fashion or power, there is a spiralling of self-transcendences here that has no end.
You answer with your life. You respond more haltingly than you might like, and as best you can. But its calling—to live in ever deeper alignment with truly effortless freedom—never ends. And you cannot not answer.
If it is successful, as mine has been to some extent, it can lead to a life of effortless transcendence, a lightness of spirit we could not otherwise imagine.
But the path we are on is not really about healing anxiety or ending unhappiness. Nor is it about ending rebirth, as many Hindus believe, though it may accomplish that as well for all I know.
No, what silence really brings to a life is a whole other real, a new metaphysical domain in which we come to live. Silence, Brahman, the Tao, Christ Consciousness—these words are pointing to a different kind of reality than everything else that we might feel or own or think or hope. Whatever else it might bring, the sacred infuses life with that which is deeply, profoundly Other.
Everything we know to hope for is within the worldly. Ending depression, owning a Mercedes, gaining bodily health—these are all worldly aspirations. The fame or political power or brilliance or wealth I have sometimes longed for are all within the world. But they are all utterly different in quality and nature than silence itself.
To encounter silence is to encounter a mystery. It is to be handed a secret you did not know you did not know, to find yourself in a story you could not have known how to write. There’s buoyancy to life in knowing the secret, a lightness beneath your breath. To know it means that everything you knew, all of this world and this body, stops being the only world there is. You come to carry an unbidden translucence.
And yet, and yet, it is not unconnected with how we be in the world.
I watched a small log get caught between two rocks in the half frozen stream behind my hermitage yesterday. It was blocking the flow. The stream billowed and boiled and pushed at it; water ran over and under and around it, streaming and pushing. Leaves and sticks and unrecognizable debris began piling up.
By this morning’s walk my little dam had disappeared. The stream no doubt pushed it loose and re-created its own freedom. That’s what this spiritual life is all about: free flow; then whenever and wherever it gets blocked, re-creating its flow. And so it goes, until we live freedom, freedom everywhere.
My friend Tom Duffy, a meditator of forty some years, is an outrageously hammy and charismatic leader of the New Hampshire-renowned rock and roll band, “The Effengees: Like a Garage Band only Louder.” Effengees’ gigs are riots of foot stompin’ and humor and power. They’re times to dance like no one’s watching, to drink a little more than you should, and to belt out “Mustang Sally” and “Go Johnny Go” as loud as you please. I’ve seen as much joy at Effengees events as I’ve seen on any meditation weekend. It’s probably not as life altering, but gad, those nights are a hoot!109
During a set break I sat next to a Korean Zen Roshi.110 I’m quite fascinated by Korean Zen and she seemed lovely sitting there, all primly folded hands, shaved head and silver robe. So I sat down next to her. I asked about her kids. I asked about her Zen center. I asked her with a smile how on earth she kept her robes so crisp?
She responded, quite correct, earnest, slow voiced and monosyllabic. You know: the distant and impenetrable sage act.
It was like chatting with a wall! I never learned where she was born, what she liked, whether she was divorced. And not once did she smile.
After a little while, I gave up. A Zen student soon wandered over and sat on the floor, literally at her feet. Suddenly she was all low register and stately Zen teacher voice. She actually seemed relieved that she could now play Roshi.
Perhaps knowing that a student or two was there cramped her style. And no doubt, I can be a bit much. But honestly, I found her frozen nearly solid, without a shred of personality or vulnerability or doubts or playfulness. There was no way to contact her as a human being, and certainly not as a woman.
I wanted to shake her and shout “Gad, lady! What good is all that sitting if you can’t play? This is an Effengees gig, for god’s sake! Can’t you stop being the Roshi? Come on, let’s boogie!”
We spiritual types can take ourselves soooooo seriously, can’t we? Christians, Hindus, Buddhists: we can all get so painfully earnest! Can you even picture Maharishi, Muktananda or (oy!) Pope Benedict getting down, loud and happy with the Effengees? (I could see Deepak Chopra maybe, or Ram Dass before his stroke. I’d bet the Dali Lama could do a mean bunny-hop if he’d lose the robes!)
But most of us spiritual types, especially those of us who take on the guru or priestly role, get so into the act, so sober in our sobriety. It’s like we’re hiding behind our self-appointed “Obi-wan Kenobi” robes.
This is not freedom. It is just another garden variety attachment.
To think that the only “spiritual” tone is serious, deep voiced and kindly is a spiritual blunder of the highest order. If it is anything, the complete life we are or should be after today has to include spreading our arms wide to the whole gallimaufry of human feelings and doings and actings. God save us from some bloodless “joy, joy, joy!” If we are after anything, we are after full-bodied freedom. We are after the complete and unhesitant use of head and intellect, stretching from heart and love to head and thought to crotch and animal sex to foot and stompin’. I want to be awake, utterly non-resistant, to pain and joy and love and loss and boredom and knowing and not-knowing, wide open to the full catastrophe that is the paradox of a whole, confusing human life.
What makes a life spiritual is its range, for God’s sake, not its sobriety. Life is movement. The more alive you are, the more flexibility you live. And vice versa.111 The truly spiritual can flow any-emotional-where without any hesitation whatsoever. Effengees gigs are times for foot stompin’, not slow talking; flirting, not sharing dark secrets; and if you’re free in all things you can enjoy their outrageous New Hampshire gigs without hesitation. The real spiritual freedom I think we should be after can go deep and serious and funny and raucous and thoughtful and can plan with a spreadsheet, each when the time is right. It can play alne, with another and in a group, even a big one, each without holding back.
Real spiritual freedom lives unhindered, wide open in the juicy paradox that is being a poly-modal human being. We are beckoned by possibility.112
It is a deep irony that those who are called “religious“ tend to be among the most stuck, the most obsessed. The ultra orthodox Jew, the fundamentalist Christian, the jihadist, the silver robed Korean Zen monk have co-opted the word “religion” and have re-defined it as its very opposite.
The true “religious” are the free, the bendable, the open, the fluid. They alone are the scions of God. People in funny clothes and strange headgear, people who do precisely what their tradition says, people who have stopped being open to the simple humanity of someone on another path or are no longer able to play—these are not the religious, they are the frozen. Such people have taken God and cast Him into their group’s very own golden calf. Religion that believes in religion, says Buber, “has become the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation.”113
Religion should make us more alive, not less, more flexible, more responsive, not less. That’s why Psalm 33 says, “sing unto Him a new song,” not the same old song sung in the same old way. The soul-jazz-enlightened are the most free, not the most obedient.
Or the most prim. Rather than some distancing “joy, joy, joy” or some pressed-robed “sober, sober, sober,” the spiritually free human being is effortlessly open, i.e. lives jazz in the soul, under any circumstance.
Lord let me dance to that old rock and roll music and sit comfortably on the meditation cushion and weep with melancholy and mourning and think creatively with my buddies and love the gentle curve of a woman’s back, each at the right moment.
Don’t get me wrong. True human freedom, I’m coming to see, is not some return to a teenage dance-till-you-drop hedonism. Most of us have known how to dance since we were kids and learned to screw long ago, though perhaps not as lovingly as we might. What is new here is the core. Most of us cannot fathom the spacious emptiness to which that prim Korean Zen teacher has dedicated her life. Most of us, frankly, cannot connect with our own depths very well and even less can we connect with the depths of another. Most of us run away from the secrets hidden in silence and hide from the divine spark. The truly spiritual person can access the deepest silence, the most critical intellect, the most painful psychic memory and the sexiest kiss, each equally and each without hesitation.
What I think we should be after, what I’m after, is true freedom, deep and wide.114 It includes the tears that well up with unabashed love, the easy smile that comes from a fully resolved issue with another, the silence that can only be known by being it, and laughter, real belly laughter at the Rabbi, the Priest and the Minister who walk into a bar. Such Freedom, deep and wide, flows into love when the lights go dim, into mourning when the grim reaper does his deed and gets down, really down, when the Effengees crank up. And in the midst of it all, it is as settled and non-resistant as the wind.
The goal I am envisioning then is, to be effortlessly open, i.e. to live jazz in the soul, under any circumstance, on the settled ground of spiritual spaciousness.
Now that’s a telos worth pursuing!
I took another walk with the dogs this afternoon. It’ll probably be my last. The book is nearly done and I’ll be leaving tomorrow.
Patch, Lil Girl and I tromped through the knee high snow across the great field and down the long drive to the country lane. Dusk was coming on. The sun was jutting through the clouds, low and polarized. The shadows across the road and up the sides of the weather-beaten barn seemed as if etched with a razor.
I called over to the stoop shouldered farmer, “hey, take a look at your barn!” He looked but just waved, no doubt seeing only aging wood and next year’s paint job, and probably thinking I was a coot.
The moment—angular, sharp edged and strikingly clear—was painfully dazzling. But I had no one to share it with except the dogs, who didn’t care. My momentary miracle of light and shadow was as lonely as it was magical.
I’ve often felt that way on the path. The further along I have gone down the road, the fewer the people I’ve had with whom I could share it. My TM buddies did not share my academic discoveries nor did my philosophical friends share my meditations. Bill Barnard, Scott Lowe, Philip Wexler and a few others shared both, and I used to look forward to conferences where we could have dinner and laugh over our subversively dual lives. But even so, they didn’t share my two decades of psychotherapy, nor have I shared their steps into Ayahuasca, alcohol or Yoga. I’ve never found anyone who shared my sense of non-resistant unity, nor others their shifts with me. No one has done quite what I’ve done, seen the spirit chiseled into walls just as I have, nor I theirs. There’s a poignancy in spiritual progress, an aloneness that goes with the determination that I didn’t quite bargain for.
The Forge Institute is a community of the spiritually independent. I have loved dearly Phil, Doug....and others who have been part of it. Holding hands with fellow pilgrims, jamming together as we dance across the great chasm, is one of the privileges of being human. To love and be loved by these people has been a blessing I did not expect. To have my intrepid partner Yvonne and my beloved kids Rosha and Avi walk with me through my strange and self-generated tumblings is another gift I haven’t really earned. We have gotten to hold each other’s hand awhile, and I am deeply grateful.
But today, watching the shadows sluice across the street like razors, I feel very much alone. Perhaps I didn’t share the dawning of silence with anyone back at the Hotel Karina because I couldn’t. What happens inside your neck or head, or what stretches beyond your shoulders or through the walls, is, in the end, private. It can be described. It can be discussed. But it cannot be shared, not really. In the end there is an aloneness to the human journey, a final, existential solitude.
That’s just the deal I suppose. You get to grow and learn and discover who you are, your way. If you keep at it and work through another logjam, you get to take yet one more step. But even if you hold the hand of a fellow pilgrim, you do so alone.
In that deep down place where quarks and electrons are equal, or in that deep level where I yawn in the trees, we are not alone I suppose. It is a comforting thought. But just now, walking down the lane with the dogs snuffling between lengthening shadows, it is the melancholy joy of the path I feel, the achingly beautiful ambiguity that is an increasingly conscious life.
I’d like to add, “yet I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” But I’m not sure if that’s true. Honestly, I wish sometimes that I’d stayed in the Iowa TM community. I’d be less perplexed, for sure, and surrounded still by brothers and sisters who thought and hoped like me. It’s a good life, passing your days in a community of empathy with like-minded souls. I miss it terribly sometimes.
But like leaving childhood, finding my way out of the TM world was probably inevitable, of a piece with the existential solitude I’m feeling just now. That simple thought, ‘I wonder what I have to say?’ was so natural. And so devastating. Growing up in one’s own way is not always pleasant. It is definitely not easier. But there is an inexorability to it that makes it seem very right.
It is as if the vastness in my belly and in the sun behind the mountains was beckoning from the start, and has continued to call me to this very place, this very moment. Every time I let go another “must,” every time I saw through another picture of the way things “should” be, as I always had to, I took another step both towards the real and towards the freedom that is this deeper solitude of being. Every time I saw another pattern as self-destructive or another choice as out of integrity, I was taking another lonely step into the flow.
In the end we are each alone, I suppose. Alone with the silence, alone with the shadows that chisel themselves across our barns, alone in our struggles and our discoveries.115 So no, I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade my commitment to becoming more aware in exchange for a more upscale job or an enmeshment in a wider community. But I’m also not sure I could.
Rather than happiness, or ananda, that stunningly overambitious Hindu word for pleasantness, in the end what you get is to become ever more real. You get to stand bent under the burdens of fewer and fewer of your own lies. With your feet planted ever more deeply into the soil of what is so, you get to become ever more vertical. And you get to discover with and to invite others who wish to do the same.
What the spiritual path offers is not unmingled happiness and it is not the conventional. Nor is it camaraderie or ease, though these may come. What you get instead is to be increasingly open to the joy and the melancholy that is the deeply lived life.
In the end you get to be increasingly alive, the mystery coursing up your spine. You get to be more awake, more deeply honest, freer, and to stand up straighter and straighter in it. You get to be, in all its ancient simplicity, Homo erectus.
And today, walking the dogs and watching the shadows softening now across the weather-beaten barn, it seems like an honor to which I’ve been called here in this snowbound place and through this strange life I have lived.
I have been invited, I think, into the fellowship of the erect.
In return I can do no other than to stand up straight in what I am, and, dear reader, return the invitation to you. I invite you, as I have been invited, into the only summum bonum complete enough for today: to stand up ever straighter in every domain of your life in the full mystery that is becoming free, deep and wide. I invite you into the ambiguous privilege that is a life of silence.