A famous Burmese master was once asked by his students to relate some of his experiences on the path, and he replied that he didn’t care to do so, since he might be tempted to believe it had all actually happened.
It took me some time to understand what he was getting at.
History is a lie, and so in that spirit, I’ll share a little here around the campfire, for what it's worth:
Part 1 (ages 2 – 21)
He is nearly 2 years old. Until this day, he frolics in blissful ignorance, without any sense of separation or differentiation -- the natural state -- although to even describe it as a state is adding something extra. Timeless, prior to concepts, bright and shining happy being -- all just words that of course cannot really convey the mystery rapture of the innocent heart of all of us. There is nothing but this persistent joy, regardless of any physical sensations, which are only experienced as echoes of the mystery rapture itself.
On this particular morning his mother extracts a little cardboard man from a cereal box, with a balloon that blows up into a head and attaches to the frame of the cardboard body. What delight! The big smiling face of the balloon man beams happily at the mother and child, and all is laughter, until suddenly, inexplicably, the balloon head pops with a loud bang, and the boy is faced for the first time with the raw truth of impermanence. Staggering implications flood his mind, but there is an even harsher truth in store for him.
Moments later he is sitting in a hallway, about 20 feet from his mother, and gradually a stark and undeniable observation dawns: he is distinct from his mother -- separated! She stands over a stove in the kitchen and he sits here, on the floor, in the hallway, at a distance! In an eye blink, what has happened? Heaven and earth have been split apart! A monumental fear grasps him! He opens his mouth to scream, but he is paralyzed. Dazed and mute, for the first time he perceives himself as an embodied self, and this limitation of apparent individuation seizes him in an enormous vice of panic, shock, and terror – the end of Eden. When the sense of self arises, that is the beginning of knowledge (aka ‘ignorance’), and when the sense of an ‘other’ arises, that is the birth of fear.
Thus begins my dream journey. Now I see that moment as a kiss of merciful blessing. What a miracle! I am here, I am born! Now I see that I am the cardboard balloon man, my mother, the hallway, the sitting, the fear, and yet, now I also see that none of it is truly who or what I am. This is skipping way ahead, no doubt, but the seed was planted at that moment, the seed of freedom in limitation.
Simultaneous with this event is a huge jump – I realize now that I have the faculties and mental capacity of an adult – I can read, for example -- and immediately begin studying all I can about this knowledge. My parents have a set of books – the ‘World Books’, a sort of encyclopedia collection – and over the next few months I devour all of them. Then I move on to a collection called ‘My Book House’, a wonderful set elaborating the various myths and legends of different cultures and so forth. Memories swim back into view, everything is familiar to me.
The interesting thing about all this studying is that, after reading the first few sentences of any article or story, I intuitively grasped the salient points, as if it were just a refresher or cue to what I somehow already knew. Later in school, for example, I rarely even opened the text books, but always got straight A’s on every test.
I soon began asking questions my parents could not answer, and in fact it’s clear that they are a bit freaked out by the changes they witness in me, but they have their hands full with work and such, and so I am pretty much left to my own path of discovery. My dreams are filled with images of other times, other places, and other incarnations. In a sense, I came to realize that my parents themselves were like children, despite their size, and so I gave up relying on their naïve views about reality. Out of love, I indulged their fantasies about me being a child, ‘their child’, although I realized instinctively that was not the whole story by any means (which also made it easier to leave home as soon as I could, at 13).
Meanwhile, at extended family gatherings, I would be asked the silly questions relatives tend to ask small children, but I could tell from their responses to my discourses that they were rather taken back by what they heard from this little fellow! They would ask how I knew such stuff, and I pointed out how I could read, which they simply could not believe until I picked up a book and related the entire contents therein.
A number of unusual experiences followed, until I was almost 6, and my father took me on a vacation trip from San Francisco to visit his family in Bellingham, Washington in 1954. From there, my father, his father, and three of his brothers and myself all set out on pack horses for a long hunting/fishing expedition into the northern wilds, traveling for almost a month through primal mountain country, far from even the smallest rural towns in that part of the state.
One night, well into the trip, we were camping out under the stars on the shore of a small and isolated mountain lake. I was awakened sometime in the middle of the night by a dazzling sight which struck me with intense awe and wonder -- out on the lake a brilliant fire had bubbled up from the very center and was fiercely blazing, though there was nobody near us for miles and miles – the blaze had just appeared full-blown, with no apparent source to feed it. I remember standing there, watching it, fascinated, until finally a thought appeared, and I was able to find voice enough to call my father and his gang out of their sleep to witness. They saw it too, and were equally shocked by the vision, and none of them believed their own explanations.
Somehow – suddenly – it was the next morning, and there was no sight of anything, just the lake as it was the day before. Nor was anybody saying anything. It was as if the apparition had never happened, though it had been intensely real to me. My relatives were all acting rather mechanical, and it seemed we passed the next few days in a collective mental haze.
After that, my dreams took on a new quality, and I began to experience numerous ‘voyages’, deep space travels interspersed with info ‘downloads’. One particular scene I was shown really got to me – a huge “Star Wars” type battle taking place in the night skies over a planet that seemed very familiar, yet was not Earth. At night, asleep, I was often in a kind of school, studying many fascinating subjects, and I especially remember learning how to navigate while flying, using the mind in the belly.
In August of 1957, at the age of 8, I was returning home from a Catholic Youth Organization summer camp. When I stepped off the bus back in San Francisco again, after 2 great weeks on my own in the forest, I was so ecstatic seeing my family again that my system could not handle the extremity of joy, and I fell into a kind of swoon. Words just don’t apply to what I experienced during the swoon, but when I next opened my eyes, I was lying on a couch in my parent's house. A number of hours had apparently passed. Strangely, I realized that these people were not ‘real’, but more like three-dimensional projections of mind. The whole world had taken on something of a dreamy kaleidoscopic nature, and seemed to phase in and out in harmonic synchronicity, with everything appearing dependent on everything else, but with no center or circumference, beginning or end.
Meanwhile, the family doctor appeared and could find nothing wrong, but for the rest of the summer, I just lay in the backyard, watching the clouds trailing through sky. Time was irrelevant. The smell of the earth, the feeling of absolute presence, the subtle shifts of light and shadow, the indivisibility of all phenomena reflected in the synchronous sounds of birds, bells, and deep planet humming – all arising simultaneously, all dissolving in my own being – how could I explain this to my parents when they asked me about my experience?
At school in the fall, I lost all interest in the lessons, falling into the swoon more often than not, just looking out the window at the sky. I would suddenly find myself in a room with other children, then I was somehow lying down in my backyard, it was night, it was day, none of it had any substantiality, everything was one piece, just like a piece of smoke. I was in love with this, absorbed, but I didn't know what any of it was -- it didn't even occur to me -- it was already gone before I could solidify or objectify it enough to try and grasp it, more like river water flowing through my fingers. It was all breathing, vanishing, appearing, changing, it was all transparent, it was me, all of it, but I was not it -- none of it. How could I say anything?
Sometimes I would find that I had wandered 8 blocks or so down to the Pacific Ocean, through Golden Gate Park, and I was standing at the edge of the surf, but didn't remember how I got there, so what -- just the feel of the water lapping at my toes thrilled me with an indescribable ecstasy. Other times I would climb to the top of the tall firs and just sway in the wind and play with hummingbirds. They would pause right in front of my face and share their happiness! There was no other day than this one, but later I was told about the God, and how I was born a sinner, separated from home, and had to get back to that God. This never made sense to me – back to where?
Still, everyone seemed to agree with this particular consensus view, since I was raised in an Irish Catholic environment, and so I decided to test their hypothesis. Moreover, I was greatly inspired by my invalid Grandmother who lived with us, and who was something of a mystic. She taught me how to merge with the Sacred Heart of Christ and pray for all the beings alive that are wounded and suffering. This seemed like a wonderful practice! I became the first altar boy in my class, so I could be closer to this God they all assured me was watching over me. At the age of 13, I entered a Catholic Seminary to study for the priesthood, since priests were reputedly on speaking terms with this God, and more importantly, they selflessly served all the people who were suffering from various confusions regarding their relationship to God. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the lives of the saints, and would often get out of bed at night, lie down on the floor in a crucifix posture, and dissolve my being in the light of unbearable loving grace (the grace-light of my own mind, if truth be told, but that’s a recognition that would come much later).
Over the course of the next 7 years in the Seminary, I spent a great deal of time studying the various texts, performing the many prescribed rituals, and was always at the top of my class academically, though I found that the more I examined this religion, the less I was convinced that it had any actual merit, beyond serving as a social control mechanism operated by questionable people with even more questionable motives. Finally, I asked for a personal interview with the Archbishop of San Francisco. This went rather poorly, and I left with the clear sense that this person had never actually experienced anything that he preached about. He was sound asleep inside – a dead man walking.
One interesting event occurred on my last day at the seminary. I had hiked to the top of a hill that night at about 10 pm with several of my fellow seminarians. We were sitting in a circle at the top of the hill chatting about school times when a bright light appeared over our heads in the sky above us. At first we thought it was a helicopter, but there was no sound. We were intrigued as it remained hovering motionless, but there was a clear sense of something ‘intelligent’ about it. As we continued to stare and speculate, about half an hour seemed to pass, and consequently we were all quite confused when we realized that we could not account for the past three or four hours there, and it was nearly morning.
Well, I had had enough of the religion experiment in any case, so I packed up and moved to the Sierras, where I spent the next 6 months living as a hermit in a small tent by a river, and eating a lot of trout. This new adventure was quite refreshing, and filled with revelations, including my second brush with death by drowning (the first being the day when I was swept out to sea in an undertow while surfing at the age of 12).
In a previous life I was a reclusive botanist in Germany’s Black Forest, and so felt quite happy alone in the woods this time around. Then one day an old friend came to visit me in my mountain hermitage, and left me with a copy of a book on Zen. I devoured this book, since it was like a reminder of my time prior to getting involved with the God-business. When I came upon one particular passage – a little poem about how trees are just treeing – everything suddenly fell away – how obvious it all was! My life was to take its next big turn when I returned to the City and found a draft notice waiting for me. The Viet Nam War was heating up, and my so-called country wanted me to get some killing done.
(to be continued, maybe)
Blessings!