Some Simple Rules for Inner Peace
I wish my parents had told me ten great rules for happiness which their long experience in life had taught them. I wouldn’t have listened, of course. Anyway, I offer these to my children, who will doubtless learn them as I did, from experience.
--Walk. A lot. Our bodies were evolved by walking with just a little running thrown in. Aerobics, pumping iron, distance running, etc. eventually hurt you. When you walk, you can still think and see lots of interesting stuff. The body loves it. It brings peace.
--Bathe, don't shower. A bath open your pores so all the dirty sweat can get out. It relaxes your muscles and you can get away from things. Showers feel like a task.
--Get over the past. Also the future. All the fun is in the present. Regret and fear define past and future tripping. It’s hard, yes. And once you get going, the present just keeps opening up to immense pleasure and mystery.
--Dump the lame language. It matters. Thought creates reality. Say “and” instead of “but.” (“But” just negates everything you and they were saying and thinking). “I want” has much more power than “I need.” Ditto “won’t” or “don’t want to” over “can’t.” “Should” really bites. Use “I” when talking about what you know, rather than that endless, abstract “you” thing. And prune those pain-n-death cliches, like “dying of thirst.” Say “yes” a lot. Say it as the first word of the day. Yes is the great enabler, door-opener and mind-opener.
--Complain only to the one who can do something about it.
--Screen news. You learn almost nothing from crime/disaster stories. Search for the amazing, good ones, like a new missing-link skull from Africa or a politician telling the truth.
--Get funny. Laugh and smile, even if you have to force it at first. It kicks in. Yes, you do have the power to shift your mood and attitude.
--Accept all traffic and parking situations without disappointment. Think of time spent in traffic as time to look upon the present with happiness.
--Do frequent rituals of thanks. Thank all the little and big things: thank mint tea, thank, the birds and grass, thank coffee and clouds, thank summer, thank your teeth, etc.
--Forgive it all. C’mon, just do it. Immense benefits result. If you believe they hurt you, then you don’t have the power and can’t go on. It doesn’t mean you’re a sap and they can walk all over you some more. It means you’re taking the power to use it for learning.
--If you do therapy, remember to stop. Therapy is a time of discovering grief, fear and anger and learning to defend yourself. The purpose is to love better. It’s easy to start defining yourself by your wounds and talking it up forever. Therapy is so you can get over the past, grow and keep recreating yourself.
--Pain, mistakes and loss are vital to growth and learning. Apparently, dead people in heaven can avoid these. We can’t. Think back on your worst pain, loss and error. Notice that the best times happened soon after. Pain is nature’s way of telling us to let go of what’s not working. We go on to what works and are happier.
--Admit mistakes. Apologize.
--Promise yourself a cookie. Offer yourself rewards for just about everything you do, even if its only a video rental and some chocolate. It’s a fun game.
--If you’re partnered, still take your own space and do your own thing. Keep a big part of yourself for just you. The partner doesn’t want all of you anyway. Take classes and trips only you take. Have friends only you have. Have secrets only you know. In freedom, you grow and change, so you bring new, exciting stuff to the partner.
--Easy with the Puritan stuff. In general, you can trust your instincts. TV and sugar may be bad, but if you get rigid about it, you just feed a reverse process where your body learns to fear its environment, so stress builds up. Relax. The Romans had a saying, "Too much religion causes evil." Too much anything causes it.
--The Best Things in Life Aren't Things. Enough really is enough. Living simply opens up the present.
--Find the “off” button. Be still. Just sit. Watch your thoughts happily. It’s a mystery how it works, but meditation leaves you with unaccountable strength and peace.
--Lose the third-party talk. Gossip may seem exciting at first. It may seem to create intimacy with another or to make oneself seem wiser. In fact, it’s a tremendous drain on personal power, even if you’re talking about distant figures, like politicians or celebrities. This one discipline seems to make the soul especially happy.
--Sex is the big gift from nature and the gods. Enjoy. By the way, this is how children get here. That’s the other big gift.
--Without malice, tell the extreme truth. It will cost you most of your friends. It will also attract new, much better friends and you won’t have to spend so much energy managing your story and trying to be someone you’re not. Especially, tell the extreme truth about yourself. It’s really laughable once you start. You’ll be slow to criticize others after that.
--The gift of getting older is realizing it doesn't matter what they think of you. It only matters what you think of you. That's a good definition of self-esteem. Also of happiness. We’re here to be happy.
That Most Blissful and Felicitous Moment
On the first day I was in Oregon, in fall 1967, driving north on the freeway between Medford and Grants Pass, I experienced a most singular phenomenon.
I was just out of college and on my way to a new reporting job in the capital. It was Saturday. I’d dropped my girlfriend at the airport, so she could get back to her job. Now I was alone and heading deeper into this lovely state I’d never set foot in before.
Gradually, something began to shift, to open. I began to feel elevated into some sort of unaccountable happiness. Everything began to look and feel different than it ever had in my life. All things seemed keenly alive with knowledge and possessed of a bliss and wisdom it readily shared with me. I was in rapture. All trees, hills, clouds, every atom revealed its knowing love to me and took me into its secrets. This went on for ten minutes, then faded, leaving a delicious afterglow.
I pulled over to the Merlin rest stop and wrote in my journal: “I have never known such peace, such sureness of myself, such a positive knowledge of the unity of all times, all places, all people. I have accepted it all at last. How difficult it is to tell of it without cliches. This is no surge of idealism. This sense of the truth of things shall never leave me…(I write of a girl I loved in high school and how) it has so often seemed another life, another world, but it is this time, this place. There must be no more repressions. Come forth, all experience and be claimed!”
I understood what people meant when people say God spoke to them. Yet there were no words – just content. The intelligence of the universe was palpable and spoke in everything. It’s like the gods pulled back the curtain on all the secrets and energies of the universe and smiled and welcomed me in. They let me sit on the throne for a few moments and wreathed me in bliss. They seemed to say: when you make big choices about things in life, like love, work and children, if they feel at odds with this, don’t do them. I knew it all as absolute truth. I knew I would never forget this moment, although I would never be able to even partially describe it. The universe just said, hey, this is it, this is what it’s all about, this is my naked body of love for you. Got it? Have a nice day, bye.
Remember that famous woodcut of a shepherd flinging himself on the ground as he beholds the dazzling wheels of heaven? That’s it. That same thing happened to that artist.
People may work for years, meditate, study, do vigils and vision quests, yoga and fasts and perhaps not realize that moment of bliss that often just settles on people who haven’t sought it and have done nothing special to earn it. All of us have this coming to us. It’s part of life, a natural function. And it changes your life. It’s something no parent or guru or university can give you. It can’t be made to happen. It’s a kiss from God, a blessing, a beatitude-epiphany-glory thing from nowhere. It becomes the “north” on our compass, the deeply felt yes-ness we orient to.
In his 1963 book “Mysticism,” F.C. Happold describes seven key elements of these glimpses of heaven.
--The universe stands shimmering, pervaded by a sense of oneness in which you experience what you can only call divine. You see and know it is present in all things, including you.
--Any sense of one’s ego, with all its fears and separateness, seems to vanish. You sense there is a bigger “you” of which you are part.
--There’s no sense of time. All is now.
--You don’t feel you’re doing this. It’s being given to you. You’re passive. You feel you’re being held by a power outside you.
--It’s ineffable. It’s not like anything else. It’s non-rational and can’t be put in words.
--It’s brief, coming on suddenly from nowhere and slipping away in a few minutes.
--Knowledge and insights are gained. Things have new significance. What you learn, you trust as real and as coming from an absolutely authoritative source. It often changes lives.
In “The Root of Matter,” Margaret Isherwood recounts a woman’s experience at age nine: “Suddenly, the Thing happened, and, as everybody knows, it cannot be described in words. I remember saying to myself, in awe and rapture, ‘So it’s like this; now I know what Heaven is like’…Soon it faded and I was alone in the meadow with the brook and the sweet-smelling lime trees. Though it passed, I was filled with great gladness. I had seen the ‘far distances’.”
Is it brain chemicals? Is it something you can get in the endorphins of high-risk adventuring or from long-term stilling of the mind? I think it’s quite different. As Leonard Orr, the creator of rebirthing observed, we’re always in a state of bliss, but our minds, crammed with suppressed emotions and conditioned for survival, see life as a constant problem to be solved, a threat to be defended against.
Mystic transcendence always lies near at hand. It has taught us much, prodded the growth of human intelligence and given us our grasp of the divine. We’re likely the only animals who experience it. As an artifact of nature, the gratuitous mystic opening must have some purpose, as nothing in nature is superfluous. Perhaps it’s a remnant of paleolithic days, when we experienced our world and the divine world as one -- and such visions were common. Now they’re rare, a one-in-a-lifetime gift, which only hint at the paradise we came from and shall return to.
The Biggest and Most Bashful of Religions
There’s a new religion afoot in the world and it has taken care not to have any scripture, hallowed halls or vehement, righteous socio-political agenda. It’s just happening. And it’s very widespread, very personal and very deeply felt.
The leaders of organized religion have damned it with a somewhat appropriate name: secular humanism, which means “people-not-like-us.” But to its adherents it’s known as, well, just what I know and feel inside me about love and nature and having children and just the miracle of being alive.
It’s a bashful religion. Most Americans don’t even know they have it. They just know what they know and they think they came to it independently. If you asked them, a quiet majority would probably say they’ve had enough of the jihads, persecutions, guilt-trips, hatreds, damnation and social agendas of “religion,” but they do have a “spirituality,” and it goes something like this:
· Religion isn’t in church or a book or some heaven after death. It’s right here, all around us in the mountains, trees, rivers, clouds and in our hearts and the hearts of those we love. We feel it regularly and we see that we and everything has spirit, so in drawing meaning and sustenance from this, we say we have spiritual lives.
· God doesn’t have a gender and doesn’t look humanoid and doesn’t judge us. God isn’t apart from this world. God or Goddess is love. Love is the vast, pervasive energy and intelligence which created this outrageous, writhing, hungry, curious, vicious, colorful, sexy, compassionate universe, including us and everything we see and know. This energy is eternal, without beginning or end and we are inseparable from it. It’s the Great Is. It feels wonderful when we stop spending enormous amounts of energy thinking we’re apart from it.
· We don’t want to say we’re “environmentalists,” because that’s just more divisive politics. However, we see that everything, all life and all things are sacred and we know they all have a right to be here which is equal to our right to be here.
· We recognize democracy not as just a political phenomenon, but rather an outcome of the reality that all things have spirit and that spirit is love. Democracy extends, therefore, not just to all people, but to all creatures and things. A tree, a river, a valley – they all have rights, they all have a place at the table and all must be heard. In our most blissful, conscious and loving moments, we do hear them clearly.
· There are no separate entities such as mind, emotions, body, heart, spirit, ego, subconscious, etc. They’re all me. They’re also all you. These all flux endlessly into one another. There’s no god distinct from me-who’s-not-god. These are all concepts and any one or all, whether in me or in all creatures and things, can be viewed as distinct one moment and as all Spirit the next moment. The Native Americans called it Great Spirit. That’s a good name for all of it.
· It’s not evolution vs. creation. That’s just more divisive bs used by scoundrels to gain converts, power and money. It’s creation AND evolution, silly! We know deep down that while maybe things can evolve, life itself didn’t spark into being through evolution. It was an act of consciousness of the part of Spirit and Love. (Notice how you can interchange the last three nouns in that sentence.) Evolution can occur through the desire, vision and will of us creatures, however.
· Take sex, for instance. Humans have evolved sex to be an amazingly ecstatic, virtually godlike experience through which we learn a lot of what we know about the great mystery. Others creatures didn’t evolve this, just us. It’s not a mutation and it has no special survival significance, as you’d think with a big trait. We’d survive ok with just perfunctory sex, like dogs and cats do. But we envisioned it somehow and wanted more and more of it, so now it’s drenched in cosmic love and we can do it for hours, not just in estrus but every day of this year. This is us being co-creative with that pervasive and eternal creative Spirit.
· Illness and painful or early death are tricky areas to reconcile with religion, as they seem not to spare “good” or religious people at all. So, we end up thinking our fear of death and pain are unfounded or illusory. From the point of view of Spirit or Love or God, then, incarnate and discarnate life must be about equal, whether we like it or not. So must pain and pleasure. Or having stuff and not having it. A lot of the meaning of life, if there is one, might be about absorbing that lesson.
· We can be here to have lots of success, money, power and goods or we can be poetic, sensitive and philosophical and live in the present or we can do whatever. It doesn’t matter. But we do have to be ourselves. We seem to come into this life as distinctly ourselves and the core nature stays the same all our lives. We come in showing the naked core - pure soul - then we acquire layers of personality - like an onion. Then in later years, in search of that core, we peel away the onion. And sometimes we cry.
· What’s it all about then? We don’t know. We’re not supposed to know where we came from or where we’re going or if someone “made us.” But, paradoxically (all great mysteries have paradox), sometimes we do know. For sure. When we do, we feel great bliss and wisdom. But it goes away and we just guide ourselves with it. We understand it’s all supposed to be a mystery most of the time. And we’re supposed to be brave and enjoy that mystery.
‘We’re Not Afraid of Crater Lake’
We often hear, when the story of Crater Lake is told, that the Indians were deathly afraid of it. That’s what I heard and read in 1972, when I did a special on it for Medford tv. And that’s what I broadcast. I’d like to apologize for that.
The conquerors get to write the history. The white settlers conquered the Indians, so this is the white story, which implies that Indians are full of childish superstition, that they lack proper awe and that they hadn’t a clue about what really makes a volcano – magma being forced to the surface by pressure from the tectonic plate which subducts the coast – and therefore whites are smarter, more realistic and generally more grownup and that’s why we run the place now.
After a 1904 journey to Crater Lake, the florid poet-essayist Joaquin Miller summed up the white bias in a Sunset Magazine article:
“No Indian has ever set foot here or near here. No doubt the story of the explosion, like the story of the Flood, handed down by tradition, had something to do with their fears. They had peopled the lake with goblins, sea monsters and so on…[when whites brought some Klamath Indians there] only a few would look on it and that with reluctance. One very old man kept his hands clasped and his head down…he stole away and hid behind a tent.”
Miller was right about one thing: the eruption and collapse of Mazama, then the tallest mountain in Oregon, made a tremendous impression on the region’s natives and their mythos. Will Steel, who fought 17 years to get Crater Lake set aside as a national park, found this out when he took down the legend of the Klamaths in 1885.
The eruption, they said, was not a geological thing we call a volcano. It was an elemental battle between Llao, the god of the lower world, and Skell the god of the upper world we live in, the world of air, trees, people, sun, life. Llao wanted the chief’s beautiful daughter Loha as his love. She didn’t want him. Sound familiar? It mirrors the Greek myth of beautiful Persephone, stolen to the lower world by its god Hephaistos.
Llao’s anger showered the surrounding forests and desert with flames, lava and ash, reaching into the homes of the Klamath, who took refuge in the waters of Klamath Lake. Two shamans of the Klamath saw that a sacrifice was needed. They walked to Gewas, as they called the mountain, and threw themselves into the flames. Skell respected these brave holy men. He descended from the skies to the top of Mt. Shasta and battled Llao through the night, driving him back to his lower world. In the morning, the Klamath people looked to the West and saw Gewas was gone. They made pilgrimage there, wept for their departed heroes and filled the crater with their tears.
Which tale is “real”– ours or theirs? It’s likely the pre-contact Klamaths would find our geology bizarre and heartless, just as whites found their story charming and naïve.
With the centuries, the Mazama crater filled with water. It’s majesty was just too much for the Indians and they never went there – so says the persisting white legend. But Steel got a different story in a talk with Klamath Chief Allen Davey, published in 1890:
Ages ago, a Klamath hunting party found the now water-filled Crater Lake. “They silently approached and gazed upon its face. Something within told them the Great Spirit dwelt there and they dared not remain.” They camped far away, but one Klamath was compelled to return and sleep at the lake’s rim. He did this each night. “Each visit bore a charm that drew him back again…each night strange voices arose from the waters and mysterious noises filled the air.” Soon, he went to the water and bathed in it. He saw wonderful animals and beings who looked like his people, but lived within the water. “He suddenly became hardier and stronger than any Indian.” Many from the tribe repeated his rites.
This is a classic tale of vision quest, probably handed down for 5,000 years. Prof. Theodore Stern, University of Oregon anthropologist, details it in an ethnographic report: Among Klamaths, “supernatural power is sought by visiting places where sacred beings were thought to reside and, through ritualized industry, gaining their favor.” The Klamaths sought power for fishing, war, lovemaking, gambling, footracing and curing. Post-menopausal women also sought power. “The questor went alone into the mountains where, for five days, he fasted, piled rocks, wrestled with trees, ran, perhaps took sweatbaths and climbed hilltops to sleep. He might swim in springs inhabited by spirit beings. If granted power, he might dream of a token…the spirit itself might appear…his spirit song in his ears.”
All this magic happened right here around us, but through warfare, disease and removal to reservations, was wiped out almost before anthropologists could record it.
At first, whites weren’t sure they could trust legend about Indians witnessing the creation of Crater Lake about 5700 BC. Luthur Cressman, noted UO archaeologist, erased any doubt when he and his students dug below Mazama ash at Fort Rock Cave in 1936.
“As we dug,” Cressman wrote, “we went through a bed of volcanic ash…and suddenly, under this, came upon a sandal. It was made of rope of twisted sagebrush bark, unlike any we had ever found. Many more came to light, about 75 in all, every one charred by fires set by hot pumice when it fell.”
You can still see a pair of these sandals, made of sagebrush, framed on the wall of that large café-bar just off the main drag in Lakeview. It kind of blows your mind to stand there in 2000 A.D. with waitresses bustling around you and realize these shoes were worn by someone right here about the time Europeans were making small, Neolithic farming villages and still hunting with bows-and-arrows.
On the last day Crater Lake lodge was open we sat on the deck watching the sun and clouds stir the beings of the deep. The magic is there, even at a casual glance. I, too, felt afraid of Crater Lake. But it was deeper than fear. It was awareness that, for 77 centuries, this place was a Lourdes, a Stonehenge, a Great Pyramid, an unimaginably holy place. If the Klamaths want to return to their vision quests here, I’d like the whole national park shut down for it.
I’ve come upon these conflicting myths through writing a public tv documentary for the centennial of the National Park in 2002. In my research, I spoke with a Klamath.
“We were just talking about that,” he said, “how we’re supposed to be afraid of Crater Lake. We’re not afraid of Crater Lake. We just have respect for it.”
A Pagan Speaks to Jesus
I just saw a button that said, “I love Jesus. It’s his fan club I can’t stand.” I laughed. Must be true. How often in life I’ve tried to imagine what this pervasive deity-man was trying to say and teach. And how different, how nearly opposite is the image of his followers in general.
Ask anyone what Jesus was trying to teach and they‘ll say: well, he was trying to teach you to love your neighbor and to not resist evil, sort of like Gandhi, to forgive those who’ve hurt you and not to judge others and also to just stop carrying around a load of guilt about past bad stuff you did and just let it go and start over today, as if it were the first day and to recognize that he and God or whoever it is out there isn’t mean and harsh. They love us. And if you can do all that, it makes a great life.
I think that’s the mythos of Jesus. That’s how most people see the message and the man. Or the god, if you will. That’s why so many people have come into the religion, especially in the simpler cultures. It’s a message of relief, of setting down the heavy load, of having another shot at inventing yourself as a good person who loves and is loved.
It’s about love. That’s all it’s about.
It’s a profound and beautiful message. I tried to go there, into the religion a couple times in my life. Couldn’t. It was the fan club. The bad music didn’t help either. I went on to study the ancient religions and to explore the indigenous, new age and earth religions and found them a lot more relevant and truthful than the message of the fan club.
But they didn’t have or teach that unique sense of grace and fire that Jesus did. Sometimes, I find myself just sitting with him and feeling what an outrageous being he was to stand up to the Romans and Jews and say: hey, you’re off track. It’s about love. All the scripture and temples and jabba-jabba yammering of phrases and the sad, pitiful looks when your fasting and the grandiose rituals and tithing and, worse than nothing at all, the violence and hatred in the name of religion – all these don’t mean anything. Nothing. These are just forms. Things. All that matters is love.
When I study the ancient world, which is a lot, I am amazed at how radical was this new preacher in his milieu. He transcended everything, all the genders of gods and goddesses, all the gods’ rivalries, violence and affairs, all the futile and hopeless violence, poverty, tyranny and disease of life and he showed you how to carry a piece of heaven right here in your heart.
I think he wasn’t a god, but I think he fully became one by stepping across that line and giving all to love. And to him, love was God and vice-versa. We are the sons and daughters of that. To do this, he had to conquer fear. In conquering fear, he learned that it was love that made his soul immortal. Then there could be no death.
I think when he said he was the son of God, he meant we’re the sons of god and he also meant daughters, but that didn’t get taken down. He said the kingdom of God is at hand and I think he meant that divine love and heaven and all that is at hand now and not at some end-of-the-world judgment day. And, if God is love, then “thou shalt have no other gods before me” becomes: put nothing ahead of love.
I’ve puzzled long and long about the fan club. I’ve asked him how I might find a way to forgive them. And how I might lose my fear and loathing, my judgments of them for the Inquisitions, infidel-bashings, clinic attacks, for the witch-burnings, fear-mongering, hellfire preaching, for the Crusades, the died-for-our sins guilt-tripping, the destruction of indigenous religions and the general demonizing of sexuality and dismissing of nature in favor of the next world.
I pray they do not come with torches and pitchforks for me, an iconoclast. I pray they do not gain the presidency or sweep over the world like avenging angels. I’m not one of them. When I see all their cars in the Fellowship parking lot or see them frenzied, waving their hands in air, I feel afraid of them.
And so, I found myself talking to Jesus. I found that he answers. I found all deities answer. They answer with a mute power that shifts understanding and makes things start happening in unexpected ways. For the better.
The answer was suffering. It’s kind of like him, isn’t it? Something happened in my life that totally slammed me into a wall and woke me up and made me look at all and everything as someone who had answers for nothing. That might be a definition of humility. The wound. The ego scrambling as it denies, gets angry, bargains, then accepts. The stopping of the mind. The opening of the heart. And, without understand why, I wept.
It goes on. I was about to honk at an “idiot” in traffic and I suddenly found myself saying, my god what am I doing? I saw myself. This rudeness of me is just a sliver of the human cruelty in the world but it’s here, right inside me, doing its meanness. Instead, I just waved. I tried to look in the other driver’s eyes. I found myself smiling.
So, on we go. I’m taking Jesus back from the fan club. They don’t own him. He’s what he says he is: a messenger of love, who, when he died, discovered the way to make all guilt and shame go away. He held the light up for us to see how the puzzle was solved. He did it as we have to do it. He did it with love.
The Breeze that Fills the Sail
I get to talk to people every day and find out some amazing thing they’re doing, building or journeying to and I get write about it for the newspaper. I’ve been a journalist since age 16 and, though I’ve gone off to many other endeavors, I can’t seem to shake this one. I’ve been given this present – being allowed to walk in and sit down with strangers and have them start telling me their most closely-held visions, joys or tragedies.
At times when I didn’t need the money or was interested in other things, I would miss this life and it would come back to me. If I won the lottery, I would still have to do it. It’s like Walter Cronkite said, the cycle of talking to so many interesting people, the information flow, the endless learning -- the words – it’s like a farmer with his dirt, hoe, corn and chickens. You can’t leave it.
Fate and intention have now given me a life of freelancing, where I seem no longer to do stories on the red meat of journalism – crime, accidents and government – but hang out with people, writing feature stories or public tv documentaries about their lives or their ancestors’ lives – or about the business they’re trying to run or the house they’re trying to restore.
Almost always in these interviews, there comes a moment when they pull back the curtain and say something about themselves, about how they understand life, about what it all might mean.
I was doing a story with Dean Cropper who makes sports braces at the factory he created here in Ashland. He pulls out an anatomy book to show me how carpal tunnel pain works. The book’s pictures are photos of a real corpse. We start turning the pages. It shows a whole human back opened up, the spine and nerves laid bare. We look at each other. “Amazing isn’t it?,” he says. “All those nerves inside us. So beautiful and intricate.”
I ask him why he moved to Ashland from Arizona. He just points out his office window at the spring sun playing across the sweep of the Grizzly Range. There it is again, the pulling back of the curtain. We nod. We both know.
I pick up an old book at Goodwill for 50 cents. Idly, flipping to a random page, I invite the book to serve as oracle, to supply me with the perfect thought for this moment. The author, W.K.C. Guthrie tells me the founders of our Western thought, the Greeks, looked at things differently than we do. While we assert there is a God, then define his qualities, the Greeks would be “so impressed or awed by the things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said ‘this is a god’.” They called this phenomenon theos and to them it meant things more than human, not subject to death and that would be here after we’re gone.
So it was in the moment with the anatomy book or Dean pointing at the mountain. We are touched constantly. We seldom feel it. It’s like a wind; we have to turn our sails to catch it and let them fill. And it's usually a breeze, not a gale. A god goes here.
So it was in Don Worthington’s double-wide in Phoenix. We talk of his grandfather, who, in a 1905 poker game, won this apparently genuine Charles Russell painting in front of us. Our talk is all about art and authenticators. I’ve got my story and want to leave and meet deadline. Then I ask Don what he might do with the several million dollars he could sell this for. He’ll use it to help market a blade he invented to cut blackberry bushes. He wouldn’t stop his work with blackberries. Here’s that curtain pulling back again. And he wants to use it to help his dear friend, a woman who’s been there for him all his life, when he went through really hard times and he takes care of her everyday and she’s 100 years old now.
So it was in talking to Barbara Finley of the Applegate. Healthy, active, positive, organic, loved, she still got breast cancer in her mid-fifties. It spread. She tells me she asked her friends and kin from all over the country to send her special totems – a stone, a shell, a picture. She spread them in a circle around her on the floor and thanked them all for their love. She wept. And, yes, a god went there. And from then on her life became about missing nothing, letting the sail fill with these incessant, divine breezes moving about us.
She says, “One day the earth opens up and things are never the same. You realize life is terribly fragile. My relationship with my children and husband is all different. No one can tell you how sweet life is until you’ve faced this.”
Cancer does this and I cannot help but sense the theos of it – a god walks with cancer, a god who sometimes demands your life, but always invites your love of life.
Guthrie tells me of another old Greek word, dike (DEE-kay) – a path or way of being what you are and were destined to be, of “following the way which is properly your own and not mixing yourself up in the ways of others and trying to do their jobs.” How direct and clear were the Greeks. In one word, they create a concept and a value, to be sought for, lived and fulfilled. No matter if you’re serf or warrior, Guthrie says of the Greek way, do that and do it with arete -- utmost skill and efficiency.
From a life of endless freedoms and choices in be-all-you-can-be America, I come home like a farmer to my dike, my earth and tools, my desk and keyboard. My children all their lives will remember the image of me with my back to them, plowing the fertile land of my keyboard. It’s all right here, theos tells us. One dike contains all dike, no matter how mundane or heroic. The face of the beloved contains all love. One day contains all days. And one story contains all stories.
RFD: A Mental Disorder We Must Outgrow
Remember when the American Psychological Assn. classified things like homosexuality as mental illnesses? They stopped that. Being gay is sane and, bottom line, it doesn’t hurt anyone. They’ve gone on to classify lots of other things as disorders that are aggravating to the people who have them, but no one else – like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It’s so cute how they made the acronym have the same meaning. Like, hey, its winter and I’m sad, so please Mr. Shrink be my friend, talk to me and give me some pills. It used to be the bartender who fulfilled all these functions. He listened, then he gave you some uppers that, by the third one, became downers, but were painkillers all the same. No more SAD till tomorrow morning.
The APA also made a disorder out of feeling bored in the public education system – Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) -- and they dish out Ritalin which shifts you from feeling bored to feeling nutty. From my POV (POV isn’t a disorder), it’s an indicator of mental health to feel blue in drizzly, gray winter and bored and devilish in public school, which, after all, is 10 percent about learning and 90 percent about crowd control.
Before the APA, we had to learn what was a disorder from the church. Ministers told us what was mentally-behaviorally healthy and what wasn’t and enforced it with one-pill-fits-all remedy of heaven for good folk and hell for bad folk. If we go back a couple centuries earlier, we have the church acting as state, so they could not only define disorders, but also carry out punishments and executions for them. This was known as the Dark Ages. This is full-on, wall-to-wall, universal fundamentalism.
Now it’s the 21st century and ever since 9/11, I’ve been watching CNN/Fox in awe, not just about the damage the terrorists did, but the whole bizarre religious context in which they did it. Yes, yes, the three main religions dominating the world roughly west of the Indus River are religions of peace and almost all their adherents are fine citizens -- so we are reminded frequently by the president and many others. But we’ve got a problem, Houston, and it’s that these three main religions, which flow from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age tribes of the eastern Mediterranean desert, all happen to lend themselves easily to extremes of religious persecution, witch burnings, book burnings, Crusades, clinic bombings, terrorism and war. They also don’t like dancing. Usually, this is called fundamentalism and it’s time we started classifying it as a psychological disorder. How about RFD – Religious Fundamentalist Disorder or, if applicable, Religious Fanatic Disorder?
I will take it upon myself now to make the first diagnosis under this new disorder: Osama bin Laden, who stands at the fanatic fringe of Islam, bereft of the slightest traces of doubt that he’s doing the divine will of the one true god. The second would be the Christian televangelist Jerry Falwell, who feels pretty much the same way and proclaimed that the Trade Center Attack happened because God was disappointed with Americans for tolerating stuff like homosexuality, abortion, drugs, divorce and anything else Falwell can raise money to battle.
The indicators of RFD are that there is only one God and he happens to be the one worshipped by the sufferer of this disorder. All other gods aren’t real. Worse, they make the real god angry. The RFD patient will feel God and he are on the same page, that is, since he vigorously follows God’s rules, then he is an agent of God, carrying out God’s will. God is aggrieved of the world’s incessant sinning and wants the world cleansed, so if the patient helps out by attacking sin, then the patient is doing good. Suddenly, violence becomes ok. The RFD patient believes heaven is much better than this life and can’t wait to get there. So he becomes unafraid of death and tends to look on the pleasures of life – tv, alcohol, sex – as evil distractions that are offensive to God. Since death is the gateway to hell for sinners, it’s ok if he helps them get there.
What’s the difference between RFD and cult behavior? Extremist fundamentalists operate under the legitimate umbrella of major religions. Cults stand alone and are a lot smaller. As for mental health, there’s little difference.
One wonders why RFD thrives at the fringes of the three great Western/Near Eastern religions. A look at Eastern religions reveals big differences. In the world roughly east of the Indus River, you find the stuff that has attracted bohemians and intellectuals of the West, from Yeats to Kesey: Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and many aspects of Hinduism, such as yoga, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita. Folk of these regions have plenty of war, but it’s not much about religion. We don’t see, can’t even imagine, the Tao guys attacking the Zen guys.
The reason, I think, is that the spirit world of the Eastern folk has a weak executive system. God is there, but he’s not dyspeptic and doesn’t whup ass on bad folk. In the West, God models the strong executive system, where there can be only one person at the top, he’s a guy, his rules are clear and the punishment for breaking them ain’t pretty. It’s about behavior. Right behavior brings big reward. It appeals to your self-interest and your fear of pain and death. God can be your friend and ally or, come judgment day, your worst nightmare. You don’t toe the line and, buster, you’re toast. It’s just plain vanilla patriarchy and like all patriarchy, its essence is domination.
An ancient passage from one of the three great monotheistic religions is typical of Western/Near Eastern thought: “For the unbelievers we have prepared fetters and chains and a blazing fire, but the righteous will refresh themselves; they who keep their vows and dread the far-spread terrors of Judgment Day.”
In the East, God is more of an energy, an inherent genius and source of understanding which brings bliss. He’s not your personal buddy, handing out favors to his most devoted followers. But an inherent wisdom and justice is functioning in the universe. You get the prize if you learn and grow, not just if you follow the rules. If you behave badly, that behavior (not God) delivers its own nasty consequences. You feel bad, people don’t like you, you become poor and unhealthy, you’re depressed. Finally, eventually, naturally, you seek a way to think and live that’s in harmony with the universe. With truth. Ah -- the old question -- what is truth? The tree is known by the fruit, isn’t it? Seeking harmony with the truths of nature, love and eternity should bring about an enduring sense of well-being, inner peace and an empathy and affection for others. If it doesn’t, it ain’t “truth.” If it leaves you judging and angry with those of differing religions or behaviors, it’s not truth.
An ancient passage from the Dhammapada is typical of Eastern thought: “We are what we think, having become what we thought. Like the wheel that follows the cart-pulling ox, sorrow follows an evil thought…There is only one eternal law: hate never destroys hate; only love does.”
The Taoists named their religion after this experience of coming to harmony with divine nature. Tao means simply, nature or the way -- the way that is, naturally, and which becomes apparent after suffering and with the wisdom of years. I haven’t reached this place. It’s a big goal in life for me. I’m doing my best not to be mad at Osama and Jerry. I’m not doing that well, not in the fall of 2001. Someday I may.
Keep Your Tubes Outta Me…
It’s a Good Day to Die.
“Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.”
--William Burroughs
This past winter, for the first time, I saw someone die. It’s quite ridiculous it should have taken these many decades before I saw death. Death happens often and we should see it often, understand it a lot better and have a whole bunch of rituals and songs for it. Instead, my sisters and I and a few of our partners stood around an ICU bed, glancing back and forth from our mom’s face to the monitor which fed out its blipping lines about heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure and oxygen absorption.
When someone would leave the room and come back, they looked first, not at dying Nan, but at the monitor. At some point in the early evening, after Nan realized for the 15th or 20th day in a row that she wasn’t going to get her white wine before dinner, she began to let go and, over an hour, her lines began to flatten. The lines, not our instinct, told us she was going to die. That’s when we began to tell her how much we loved her and what a great mom she’d been and how she’d find Bill and her parents on the other side and we’d be fine without her (lie). We began to sing her favorite old swing and jazz songs from the 30s and 40s. I sang “It’s a Wonderful World” softly into her ear, especially the line, “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do; they’re really saying I LOVE YOU.” On her lips, I put a drop of Canadian whisky, the kind in the purple bag that she and her dad and his dad loved.
Then the lines dropped precipitously. There were a few more breaths with long pauses between, then the breath with the endless pause after it. I know I wasn’t imagining it – I could feel her happiness to be in the spirit world and the happiness of those waiting for her there. It was a lot like being at the birth of my children, a mystery so silent and honest and beyond any rational assessment. Where does the spirit go at this moment? Where does the spirit come from when the children are born and they open their eyes and very soon, over several days, you realize they already have a personality, a way about them, a personal power and destiny – and they didn’t learn it here. They came with it from – where? – from the same place Nan just went to.
We held hands around her and I did a prayer asking that she be taken happily into paradise, which apparently, she was. I cut a lock of her hair with my Swiss Army knife and kissed her forehead. The sweat of death was on it. I tasted it on my lips. I pulled the monitors off her body. I poured shots of Canadian and we all tossed them back and let them burn. During lunch the next day at Goose Hollow, I had to go outside in the clammy March wind and smoke and cry in privacy of the driveway. A red tail hawk suddenly appeared, soaring here over downtown Portland. It cut several graceful circles over my head. It was her, somehow – her spirit. How do they do this? In so many cultures, birds take part in signs to humans. In the wake of it all, death pushed lots of buttons. One sister found something to fight with us about – the ashes, I think. Another cruised on with extra positiveness. Another became a patient herself, seeing the docs about palpitations and trouble breathing. They told her she was depressed (I think it’s called grief, doc) and prescribed antidepressants.
I went home and danced in the dark with Martine to all the old swing-jazz songs Nan loved and which I grew up with. I wept for hours and felt numb in my guts for weeks. A few weeks later, Nan came to me in a dream and was young and happy and talked angel talk, which I couldn’t understand, then she woke me up so I’d remember it. I got the meaning of her words, though: she was ok. Later, I caught a Star Trek episode in which the sad crew are trying to plan a funeral for someone. They ask Worf if he has any ideas. He says, well, I don’t think I have anything sad to contribute, because in my culture death is a time of celebration about passing into the hall of heroes, where life is much better. Wow, I thought, that sounds true. Why do we -- though most of us say heaven/paradise is better -- feel so pole-axed, so riven with shock, so full of regrets that more love didn’t happen, so aching with soul-stripping loss?
The FedEx guy brought several boxes of photos and letters, most of them sent to Nan by me over the decades. It’s bizarre. I don’t know what to do with them – probably keep them in a box for my children to have when I go to the hall of heroes. Going through them, I get a sense of a big life, Nan’s, flattened into a thin archaeological layer about a quarter inch thick. Now it will never change; it’s fixed. And, really, for the first time, I get a sense of my life being two-thirds of the way down the same conveyor belt. Yes, yes, the dead live on as the love they nurtured in the hearts of their kin and friends, but, say a century from now, they’ll just be a box of pictures of someone’s great-grandparent.
Suddenly, one day I’m playing wall tennis in the brilliant spring sunshine and marveling at the purple vetch and mustard all over the hills and I have one of these moments where I say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! It goes by so fast. What’s it all about anyway?” Everyone says we’re here most of all to love and be loved and most importantly to pass that love on to our children. Yes, I know that. I do that. But seeing this death – my mom’s – far from loading me with the weight of grief, has lightened me. I feel freed. It’s killed off that Protestant Work Ethic-temperance-superego-inner parent voice thing and I suddenly decide life is what I say it is. I’ve tried to do this all my life, but now, like the slashing of a great sword, these things are cut away and I’m free.
Life seems burst out of its blossom. I hear people gossip and I don’t care what they’re saying and have nothing to add. I don’t care what people do or what’s in the news. Well, some, but not a lot. People warn me that my kids are entering those adolescent years and I should brace myself for their wild goings-on around sex, drugs, cars and rebellion. I say, I don’t care, I know they will do those things, just as I did, but they will do them well. They won’t hurt anybody. Or themselves. People warn me I should blow several hundred dollars a month on health insurance but I just refuse. It feels evil. I don’t care. They signal that cancer or heart bypasses or strokes or some combination of the above are my inevitable fate and I should plan for them – invest in them! -- so I can, well, live through them and – what? – be a very old survivor and have more years to “love life.”
But I don’t love life, I finally tell them. It’s been good, yes, (especially the 1960s!) but if I haven’t done what was important to me by 65 or 70, then what’s the point in stretching it out into the 80s and 90s, where I might do some watercoloring, see the pyramids at Teotihuacan, but realistically spend most of it with a 500-channel zapper in my clawed hand. I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to let the docs get their hand and monitors on me and have their little conferences in the hallway with the next of kin, talking about how they have good news and bad news. The bad news was anything that might let death get nearer to this 82-year old person, Nan. The good news was the next sonogram, xray, transfusion, radiation, bypass or shunt – each one of them costing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s not likely they’d be interested in doing these “procedures” if the patient didn’t have several good health insurance policies covering everything imaginable.
With the passing shock and the acceptance of loss, I found myself in the anger phase, but not anger at death. I was angry with those who tried to stand in death’s way. If she’d lived before all this medical wizardry, Nan would’ve died 15 years ago. When I say this, others counter that it “gave” us those extra years of Nan. Yes, yes, she got to see grandchildren she would never have seen and got to grow in her wisdom and caring. But it also pulled everyone into this burgeoning cult – industry, even – of life extension. What right have we to do this, to tease out lives a generation past their time? I was angry because I never got to come to grips with the fact of her death when death was ready. As the docs tricked death time after time, they seemed like they were preserving something we love – the life of a mother – but they were also trashing something natural and good: death itself. I only got to accept her death as fact when they sat us down in the conference room and said, well, we’re out of tricks. She will die today. We’ve made her “comfortable” (whammied her on morphine). Now we’re done; you can go ahead and accept it. And that’s exactly what happened. It was managed and comfortable, like the antidepressants they gave my sister to help distance her from grief – or like a Caesarean, which docs do to most mothers now, saving them from the vice of birth. Just as the dying are saved, until the last hours, from the vice of death.
But then, I don’t care. Martine and I have both asked each other, when death is come round, to let us say our goodbyes on our feet, then take us over into the desert and leave us with some water and maybe a drum and a pad to lie on. The turkey vultures will recycle us. That makes me comfortable. I hope the stars will be out and that it is a good day to die.
Even the Ceiling Lamp Has Spirit
In the lull after conquering two nations, with the economy as bad as its been in 60 years, we find Americans strangely complacent, but that’s ok because the wars seemed to have worked and even if they didn’t, who’s going to stop us – and the economy will probably bounce back because, well, this is America and why shouldn’t it? Especially with all the tax cuts, removal of environmental restrictions and disintegration of tax-gobbling social programs, such as public education.
Still, I believe in the political process, even though history has been radically altered because the reins of it were handed to a person who clearly lost the election in both popular and electoral votes, the lesson of which is (since this is not a parliamentary system) to work within the two major parties, get modern voting equipment and, yes, please vote.
I was invited to a salon discussion recently on “sustainable communities” and while I found the people and ideas delightful, when I was asked what I think should be done, I had no words. I wanted to say: recycle your garbage, turn your roof into a water catchment system, go solar, bike instead of drive, don’t have more than two kids and be nice to each other.
What finally did come out of my mouth was – keep working on yourself. Another person said: yeah, that’s what I was going to say. It’s about me. It’s a consciousness thing. Groups and parties are ok, but first the individual consciousness has to change. And only the individual can do that – usually by being thrust into upheaval and suffering by random events of life, but more often now by intent.
Which begs the question: is it changing? I would liken it to the time when just a few of our cave-dwelling ancestors 30,000 years ago came up with a complex language, art and spiritual sensibility – all of which speak to a huge and sudden realization that we’re individuals (not just herd) and can direct our own evolution. Along with this came an expansion of intelligence -- a function of awareness and the daring to question and go beyond our own comfortable, automatic behaviors. To dream, in other words.
This happened again in Neolithic farming, Minoan Crete, dynastic Egypt, fifth-century Athens, the Renaissance and America’s 1960s – civil rights, women’s rights, the environment, a landscape of new consciousness journeys -- a time of seeding for what’s starting to happen now. What IS happening?
Just in the last few years, half a dozen yoga centers have sprung up in Ashland. Tai-chi and meditation proliferate in senior centers. The Power of Now remains of the New York Times bestseller list five years after publication, when the average bestseller lasts a few months. These are just straws in the wind. But what do they have in common? A simple but very difficult (and scary) step – turning down the rational mind/ego, “experiencing out” its pain and fears and learning to live in the present.
Over 200 Ashland men (the greatest concentration anywhere) have gone through the New Warrior training. One of the things Warriors do is teach living truthfully in the present by embracing the Shadow, a Jungian term meaning the suppressed fears, shame, rage, grief and pain that live in the subconscious and run (and mess up) our relationships and goals. The unacknowledged shadow depresses aliveness and makes us project this “stuff” on others. But they’re cutting through it. Lots of people are.
Enlightenment is becoming an everyday occurrence. It happens one person at a time until you get to a critical mass of the population, maybe as small as one percent, and then you see society changing. You see it in little events. At a yard sale, I pick up a book, Life as a Waking Dream. The yard sale woman, a friend, says: you should read that. The author says if you analyze any day in your life (especially an out-of-control one) as if it were a dream, you’ll find it IS the same as analyzing a dream. In other words, oh my gawd, we’re in a trance most of the time, rarely awakening. But we can. We are.
A whole new generation is being born already conscious, smart, creative, helpful and oriented to making peace, say the people now filming “Indigo,” the movie, in Ashland – producer Stephen Simon and consciousness authors/teachers Neale Donald Walsch and James Twyman. Ashland, is a modern Athens and this is the first of many consciousness flicks to be made here, Simon says.
My boy, Colin and I watch one such movie, “Gladiator,” about great victory, followed by deepest grief with loss of family, home and vision/mission – then death. We see the slain Roman general Maximus entering the Elysian Fields (heaven), where stand his loved ones, happy to see him.
As I tuck Colin in bed, he asks: is that what it’s like when you die? You’re still ‘you’ and it’s happy and you’re with people you love? This is going to be one of those moments. An Indigo child is asking for the truth, at least as far as I can know it.
Yes, I say, all religions and seekers have said about the same thing. We don’t die. Everything is spirit. Animals, stones, even the ceiling lamp have spirit and are aware of us. There are moments when we realize it’s all one and it’s all love and that’s what guides all the other moments of our lives. I ask if he’s had those moments. Yes, he says, one summer morning when he sat on the roof and heard all the birds and saw how beautiful all the trees and hills were and just felt like I understood everything and it was good. That’s it, I said -- go find more.
Rumors of an Evolutionary Leap
In doing a survey with area environmentalists about whether we will experience some catastrophic breakdown of the environment in our lifetimes, I learn that most think we will, with global warming at the top of the list and water supply second.
Environmental activist and author Bill Ashworth of Ashland, a man not given to overstatement, said, “We’re in dire straits and we’re not going to notice till the taps run dry. The Oglalla aquifer of the Plains states, where we get 40 percent of our beef and 30 percent of crops, is dropping fast.
Warming is going to have a “drastic effect,” and if you live in Southern Florida, “I suggest you get out,” says Ashworth, author of a dozen naturalist books over the last 30 years. “It’s not just the two to four foot rise in ocean levels, it’s the energy being added to the atmosphere, making more bad storms and tornados.”
The bottom line is we’re at an unsustainable population level with the lifestyles, energy-resource consumption and environmental footprint we have – and the world expects us to lift their lifestyle up to ours. The reverse is likely what’s going to happen, that our lifestyle is going to drop to theirs.
I watch a Nature Channel show on this dread topic. At the end, they ask a bunch of environmentalists how long we have till we hit the wall in some big way. Their answers are the same – around 25 years, but that’s if we all wake up today and ferociously bend our will to reversing all the damage we’re doing, starting with radically cutting back on growth, resource use and spewing greenhouse gases.
I get a call from another environmentalist author, Alan Sasha Lithman, who wants to do coffee and talk about his new book, “Evolutionary Agenda.” Like many people, he ties it to an evolutionary jump underway, a rebirth of humankind as a new sort of species that’s a big notch beyond what we are now – and that, like all births, it’s natural that it’s accompanied by a lot of blood, pain and screaming. And hope.
“We’re not going to be able to stay in our comfort zone,” Lithman says. “The planet is positively at risk now and we’re more insecure than we’ve ever been in all history. This creates a huge background anxiety that’s bombarding the individual and filling our communities with negativity and self-doubt.”
You’ve heard that expression – a pattern gets worse just before you give it up. Well, humanity seems to be immersed in that process, which, like all addictive processes is based on denial about getting external fixes.
It’s almost surreal – the SUV explosion, the monster homes and prices, the willful shift of wealth up the ladder, the willful destruction of public schools, mainly so the wealthier kids can learn in safe, white schools or religious academies.
Hundreds of billions of dollars (and many lives) are wasted to oust one bloated warlord and get his oil while the former upper middle class reels from layoffs, runs out of unemployment compensation, goes without medical care and cozies into its new slot as the upper lower class. The investing class mines the economy. States go broke. Environmental rules are stripped and public preserves handed over to corporate interests.
I hear people say “the Universe” is doing this so that the civilized life we’ve built over the last ten millennia will go flying over the edge and really teach us the lessons we need, then we’ll be much wiser and better girls and boys. I don’t think it works that way. Trauma is not a good teacher.
Historians wisely point out that less than one percent of the people created the Renaissance that ended the Dark Ages or “The Sixties” or the United Nations or the amazing idea of democracy in the late 1700s or any major shift.
The anxiety and negativity now snaking through our society -- at the same time it tries to isolate us, Lithman says, is working as an evolutionary mechanism that’s forcing us to change and to evolve in the direction of reaching out and creating community.
We see it in projects like “My Village,” an Ashland-Talent experiment in creating intentional communities. It has affinity groups networking to launch projects like craft swaps, youth mentoring, shared parenting, alternate currency, a free clinic and even fun things like weekly poker, softball or tango class.
“It kind of serves the function of church – the community, but without the ideology,” said Tej Steiner, a creator of it. “People are deeply hungry for deliberate community building. It’s about empowering people to find out what they love in life and what kind of community they want and to act on it.”
Young Arin Ingraham, who joined My Village, summed it up, “I want to feel I’m part of something and not alone, not an outsider and rebel.” And Bill Kauth, the other creator of My Village, adds -- not to focus on doom and gloom, but the venture will open dialog and planning for community during extreme emergencies, such as ecological disaster, infrastructure meltdown, economic collapse or political repression.
There it is – the dark warning. It’s what people are thinking. Something’s going to give and it’s going to happen in our lifetimes. Lithman echoes the thought – we learn through pain. At least we always have. Maybe this time it can be different.
Meanwhile, I’m hearing a lot of people struggling with the inner part, reporting crazy, ravenous hungers for understanding, then depression (in people who’ve never had it). I see people doing agonizing inventories of who they are and why they’re here, then having glowing, inexplicable clarity, even ecstasy, then maybe thoughts of death, then horrid boredom, drawn out like an afternoon in Medford traffic. It’s scary but they tell me it’s working. It is with me, too. We’re moving into the unknown, both inner and outer. You have to learn the inner part for yourself. Then we’ll do coffee and build some community.
Pioneers and Motorcycles:
Making Good Time
Getting mail has shifted into a lovely experience in recent years. Among the bills and junk, at least once a week, here’s a padded envelope with a book from abe.com, site of 10,000 used book dealers. If you can’t find it there, it can’t be found.
Riding up to Earth Teach Art Camp, Hannah flips through the latest arrival, a hardback of Pirsig’s 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “This title is a metaphor, right Dad?” Right. It’s really about life. The author uses a bike to symbolize man’s lonely journey westward, as he enjoins the search for values in a culture of anomie – and seeks answers to his own journey into madness.
She begins reading to me. This has never happened. It’s always been me reading to her. But she’s headed for Wilderness Charter School at Ashland High School this fall – and this is the kind of book they read. The ones that question why we’re really here and what alternatives to the standard issue life – college, career, marriage, mortgage, kids, retirement – are possible.
We stop at the Mountain Ave. light. The thunderheads seethe and pile up over the Siskiyous. Time slows. I look over at this 16-year old young woman, so on a run of questioning all the answers, reeling off the lines from the book, “…plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere…Secondary roads are preferred, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on ‘good’ rather than ‘time’.”
She looks up. We laugh. Oh, this guy is telling the truth. It’s one of those real books someone writes from the heart. She has a stack of them by her bed. Makes me want a motorcycle, the quintessential American vehicle – going fast alone to nowhere, maybe to find some lost chamber of the soul.
We come to the Dead Indian Road sign. I tell her the story of how this big committee held hearings, seeking to pacify irate residents, finally inserting “Memorial” in the road name – a quintessential committee gesture, doing nothing but confusing the meaning. She shakes her head. Why not just Indian Rd? Or rename Hwy. 66 to Dead Settler Rd., making things equal. No one can handle those two words together – dead and Indian. They will always offend natives and remind the invader that 290 million of us are here because we did that.
For the Independence Day issue of the paper, I do a story on three pioneers, Helman, Hargadine and Wagner, whose names are all over the south valley. Researching, I learn they’re nice guys who westered with their families and took advantage of their government’s Donation Land Claim Act, which handed them each 360 acres of land for the taking. Where did the government get the land? They just took it, by making Indians dead.
As Helman built his mills around Ashland’s plaza (essentially creating Ashland), the locals fought for the homes they held for 12,000 years. The settlers occasionally had to hole up at a fort built on Wagner Creek. Within five years from the first claim here, the Shastas and Takilmas were gone, decimated by our diseases or removed to remote reservations – concentration camps, really – all this before anthropologists could even do them the honor of recording their language and folkways.
We do know they lived interdependently in long lodges, not independently, as we love to congratulate ourselves for doing in our hurriedly multiplying half-million dollar boxes. We know they seasonally shifted around the valley, following food sources – berries, salmon, deer. But, sixty years after the fact, a 1909 Daily Tidings story I’m reading lauds the pioneers for bravery against the “savage” natives and animals, meaning wolves and grizzly bears – all quickly wiped out.
I finish the story, shaken, frankly. And Hannah reads on, “On this trip, I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it.”
Hannah closes the book, holding it between her fingers, feeling the universe magically compressed within its smooth covers. They’d assigned her some other book to read for the summer, one she can’t get into. “I’m reading this one,” she says, declaring her independence from the program designed to teach her independence. I smile, secretly gleeful at her departing from the script. She’s conceiving the next mode of westering and she’s making good time – with the emphasis on good.
Roughly Slouching Toward Adulthood
He didn’t want to become a man – who does? Gabe is only 14 and still having a totally sick (that means wonderful in middle school language) time being a funny, loud, witty, devilish kid. He resisted it, argued against it, tried to blow it off.
But he did it, the whole 2-1/2 hour bar mitzvah. He learned to speak Hebrew and read it at length from the Torah. He looks out suspiciously, yet with a core of calm strength from the big hair that bushes around his eyes.
His dozens of pals, mostly strangers to this spiritual path, sit in the back, wearing yarmulkes, smiling and alternately bored, mystified and awed at this – a rite of passage out of childhood, something you know most have never seen, as they propel toward society’s rough passage rites of drinking, sex, getting a license and having parents implore safety around these potentially lethal, life-changing urges.
Gabe carries the three millennia-old Torah around the congregation. The hair stands up on your arms. Everyone claps and sings as Rabbi David plays guitar, frequently reminding, hey, loosen up, this is not “religion,” which takes itself so seriously and brings us long faces. This is the antidote, he says, to the misery, grief, pain and isolation in the heart of each of us. This is community, this is dancing, this is us, right now, in this love!
Then there’s that stunning moment when his dad, Steve, cuts the cord of karma (that word is actually used), saying your deeds no longer come back to me as your father. What you do now falls on you alone. Wow, bang, if there’s a moment when Gabe becomes a man, that’s it. He makes his own choices now and they’ll always be informed by that moment – and the love with which his dad handed him his manhood.
At Gabe’s party that evening, four of us, all Gentiles and parents of boys the same age as Gabe, make a pact by stacking hands. We will do this for our boys. It’s a deep instinct, to engage and ritualize the passage to maturity – and we feel it rising in us as we sip our wine, watching the sun slant across the dry hills and the full July moon balloon up over the valley rim.
Do they suddenly become adults? Many people wish – like the neighbor who calls the cops on the “gang” of 13-year olds in the delicious throes of a crab-apple fight. I talk to him – they may look like criminals, I say, with their hair in their face, their jeans half way down their shorts, their mouths full of profanity and their ears full of throbbing, in-your-face hiphop, but, ok, I call them over and ask them variously to say their names, tell what their parents do and recite their gpa’s. They’re all A-students or close. I want the neighbor to see they have names, faces, brains, families, smiles – and I keep them all talking till, indeed, the smiles start coming out.
Another thing, they’ve all lost a friend in the last few weeks – Tracy Dewey, who died in a climbing fall. I don’t bring that up. They all went to the memorial at her house, where her dad invited them to touch and read all the things in her room. One of them found a list Tracy had done about her favorite people and places – he found his name and house listed there. He had no idea, he said.
That’s the way it is sometimes. You write a line across someone’s heart, with a smile or a little gift, maybe sharing your lunch. There comes that moment in adolesence – it always comes – when you realize you have a soul and you see through things to their essence. So it is with Colin when he read that list and had to think about where she is now and that she’s almost certainly sharing this moment with him.
So it is, too, with Hannah, 16, now reading Dan Millman’s 1980 consciousness classic, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. She likes to copy down song lyrics or lines from books, then forgets them, leaving them around the house. This one, from the kitchen floor, said, “I was consciousness, recognizing itself, I was pure light that physicists equate with all matter, and poets define as love.”
There is so much going on in these kids – behind the mumbled, impatient, dismissive replies to our questions, which some parents tell me they take personally. I say – I don’t think it’s personal. And they don’t need to be grounded. Slouching into maturity, they’re rough, but they know where they’re going. They’re trying to hang onto their fire, their clarity, their very souls as they career into an adult world that seems to be largely missing these. They’re worried about that. Ask them. They would like to periodically ground us so we can have a long think about THAT.
A Righteous End o’ World Party
We’re sitting in his art gallery at 4th and A talking about the end of the world as know it, which is due in eight years, says Jose Arguelles. It’s a good thing, the coming era of peace, creativity, higher consciousness, harmony with nature, but, he says, it’s not going to be pretty – the transition to it.
Lines will get longer, traffic thicker, relationships harder, bureaucracies slower, cash flow testier – actually, you may have noticed these already happening -- as the institutions we’ve created in 5,000 years of civilization implode. Why am I not surprised to hear this? You hear it at parties, if people have had enough wine to loosen up and get down. You hear it from friends. You hear it from that still, small voice inside.
Argeulles won fame for bringing us the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, an event that opened the last 25 years of our old and unsustainable ways of war, social injustice, economic exploitation and general rape of the planet – all this being foretold by planetary and galactic cycles in the Mayan calendar.
He’s a thoughtful and likeable guy, slow-spoken, an art professor educated at prestigious University of Chicago, taught at Princeton and UC Davis, where he started the Whole Earth Festival, which is still going. His art, painted on doors, shows he’s no stranger to the psychedelic mind. And he’s no stranger to Ashland. Like many voices of the new age, he lives here now.
Why? This is where the energy is, the thought, the transformation, the people changing the world by working on themselves. Which is nice. You can feel it.
You can also feel the cost of housing changing by the minute, so that only rich conscious people will end up here, which is a contradiction because once you start segregating people by wealth, you start losing the conscious, explorative, growing edge – unless we start letting the conscious poor live in our garages, which indeed we are, if the dozens of people last week at city council are any indication – complaining about the explosion of accessory units, which for many is the only affordable way to be here.
But that’s part of the plan. We’re going to be living a lot simpler and being a lot happier inside. Meanwhile, the old ways are getting harder and that includes paying more and more to live in a place you think is special. But it’s not special here. Actually, every place is special, because no matter where you go, there you are, which is another way of saying you’re a hologram of the whole she-bang aka the Universe.
And that, if I hear Jose and lots of others correctly (including that still, small voice) is what it’s all about – and what we’re doing is shifting up to a new kind of consciousness. It’s internal and individual. The old way is about altering externals, making programs, building dams, changing rulers and fixing other nations by destroying them so we can ‘splain freedom and democracy to ‘em.
Meanwhile, until the new era, starting Dec 21, 2012, what do we do? Well, you can have a long series of nice days by learning what Jose calls mental manners – you meditate a lot, witnessing the fear- and greed-driven, internal, conditioned mindstuff that created this mess.
You look at reality as neutral. Nothing that happens is good or bad, it’s all lessons. You don’t blame, polarize or even imagine that you’re “right.” You’re not. If you’re right, you can’t learn. If you can’t learn, you can’t evolve. If you don’t evolve, you’re going to be a casualty of the cosmic crunch, the nexus to the next level in 2012, where you could be having a lot of fun painting, cooking, feasting, dancing, making music, playing with the kids, studying wisdom and being part of a harmonious, peace-n-love global community to come.
Should we believe all this? Well, it’s not a lot harder to buy than WMD, prison torture, 900 dead American soldiers, massive deficits, tax cuts for the rich, cutting meds for seniors, $100,000 college educations and pretending Florida was a red state.
Let’s let the Universe decide. Last Saturday evening, Jose is celebrating the change to the new 13-moon calendar (364 days), plus a Day Out of Time, July 24, which is why he was holding this big celebration at Ashland Hills.
It didn’t rain frogs, but basically out of the 100-degree blue, the heavens gush thunder, lighting, torrents of rain, knocking out our town’s power, then a triple rainbow. After that, lots of people threw money at his cause – we love our gurus here! -- took a deep breath and started thinking about all the fun they’re going to have, not in 2013, but starting right now.
Everyday Satori at the Beanery
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
--Wu Li
We’re hiking the Loop trail on our first and – I can already tell – last date and I remember that aphorism people always tell you when you don’t know why you’re in a “situation.” They say: everything happens for a reason.
I have faith in that, even if you can’t always see the goodies immediately coming out of life’s vending machine.
Like, 33 years ago this young couple was wandering through Golden Gate Park selling LP records to finance their trip to live in this place called the Rogue Valley and, hey, wanna come? It being the sixties, my friend Louie and I say sure. Here we are, still, and marriages, children, countless friendships have come out of that chance meeting.
So, (this is a few years ago) we’re walking along the Loop and these two guys – who look and sound like the Scarecrow and Tin Man from Oz, literally jump out of the bushes and join us, very friendly, I can tell, so I relax and open to it.
In no time, the Scarecrow, who’s also a high school teacher, is telling me about “The Power of Now,” by Eckhart Tolle, which describes how we’re all “sick puppies” because we’re trapped by our minds in the prison of the past, which incites us to regret or guilt, and the future, which makes us afraid – and drives us to devote our lives to avoiding all the bad things we imagine might happen.
You don’t ignore random incidents like this. Kurt Vonnegut called them vindits – things that push events off in a new direction. It puts an end to my date, bang, and I drive right off and get the book whose opening chapter is entitled “You Are Not Your Mind.” Fine, what am I then?
Well, basically, I’m enlightened. So are you.
“The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment and the ego likes to keep it that way,” writes Tolle, who learned all this at the brink of depression and suicide. “But enlightenment is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something, almost paradoxically, that is essentially you and yet is much greater than you.”
Then what’s the problem, I ponder, sitting in the Bean, sipping my latte?
I read on, “The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.”
Suddenly it happens. I look out at the mundane traffic, the people smoking frowsily on the deck, the students ambling dutifully through the rain to their classes. “It” is all perfect just the way it is. Nothing needs to be fixed. It no longer feels separate from me. I don’t need to get anywhere, make a million, marry anyone, get a bigger house or write the great American novel.
This satori happens again and again, though not without the plummeting back into the shell of ego. But the opening, the ecstatic coming forth into the world – it keeps flowering, lasting as long as half a day, before covering back over. I realize it isn’t that hard and doesn’t take a master and many years.
The other day, someone I know says she wants to try some heroic methods to get out of “this dreary shell of daily life and into the Divine.” At the risk of being a nosy know-it-all, I spout, but you already are in the Divine and when you’re feeling depressed, lonely and afraid, that is the Divine, too. You surrender to that too.
I don’t know where these words come from. I think they come from thousands of moments practicing the Now, if only for 10 seconds at a time. Like, every red traffic light I sit at – that’s a mandatory prompt. It says, hey, give yourself 10 seconds being right here.
Tolle suggests a game – say to yourself: I wonder what my next thought will be? As long as you ask that question, there is no next thought. As you strengthen the witness, this being watching your mind, you realize the watcher, not the mind is the real you.
Soon after, this friend at the co-op (the place where most meetings and exchanges of important information happen) urges a slim tome on me, called “From Seekers to Finders,” in which Satyam Nadeen says about one percent of the population, after going through established religions, mind-altering drugs, seeking salvation in romance and then, on giving up, enduring the wretched “dark night of the soul,” emerges into daily satori – that place where you just let it all be.
They Bring Me Tokens of Myself
It’s the perfect swimming hole, with clear, deep green water and a big diving rock, right by the middle fork bridge on the Applegate. After much hooting and diving, our boys, six of them, smiling often, sun themselves on the other bank. Their voices rise occasionally above the water. They are beautiful and we can scarce take our eyes off them.
We guzzle beer, while Ann prepares hot dogs and potato salad and Beckie reads Dylan Thomas poems to us. She named her son after him. Do not go gentle into that good night. He wrote that. The words go good with the beer, the hiss of the river, the amazing sass, humor, profanity and energy of the smiling boys.
Seeing the unusual number of lads perched on the rocks like a menace of ravens, the Forest Service ranger decides to stop and see if he can find any trouble – not hard with half a dozen 14-year olds. “Do you own these boys?” he says good-naturedly. “Well, it’s getting harder and harder to say that,” we respond.
We tell him that I, along with five other long-haired “freaks” (as hippies were known 30 years ago) lived in a log cabin on this very spot, where we had shinin’ times for a few years, without running water, except for the river, or electricity, except that which ran around in our brains.
“What happened to the cabin?” he says. “You guys tore it down,” says I, adding (not out loud) “so that, under the mixed-use policy, the timber companies could have it all to themselves.”
We’ve only a few more weeks of summer and must come back here at least once more. I want to burn these memories in the software of my soul. The boys and the moms are doing that, too. I can feel it.
I say to Ann and Beckie, don’t you wonder how the kids can leave a place like this and go live somewhere, probably a big city, so they can have a job and raise a family? And if they do, don’t you know they’ll wake up in the middle of the night and remember this river, not to mention Ashland, and ask themselves -- what the hell am I doing here?
They nod. If they go for the big city, career, big bucks and all that, it won’t be because we taught them. We laugh. Yeah, what ARE we teaching them, anyway? All the rest of it – that’s what. And we’re not really teaching it. We’re living it – doing life – and showing them this loose clan of parents who love each other and know each other’s happiness, sometimes pain, too.
It’s getting time to head back. I challenge myself – again wanting to take this old river into my mind, my bloodstream – to walk up the center of it, where it thunders down the rocks under the bridge.
It’s not easy. There’s risk. You have to pay awareness, find firm handholds and streamline your torso, so the current doesn’t carry you away. I try to get the boys to join the strange quest, but they won’t touch it. It’s just me and the river now. They think I’m a bit odd and old, I’m sure, gritting my teeth, talking to the river, learning its ways again and struggling to do this pointless, somewhat shamanic feat of controlled folly.
But I do it, finally, coming up in the still water at the fork, where you can still see the treehouse Ron and Carol built and lived in, in the summer of ’71, when they were so in love. You never get over things like that and I doubt he has. The poles are broken and hanging down -- still unreachable unless you cross water. My throat catches. I hold it back. I dive into the slow water, stroking even with the clean stones on the bottom.
Driving back in the slanting August sun, Beckie reads Whitman to me. With the windows down, I hear only snatches, which seems right…I think I could turn and live with the animals…they bring me tokens of myself…I do not know where they got these tokens…I must have passed this way untold times ago and negligently dropped them…Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know what is true, what I guessed at when I loafed on the grass…I am afoot with my vision…All this I swallowed and it tastes good…I like it well and it becomes mine…I am the man…I suffered…I was there.
On the Road to Homo Deus
People standing in line to get their books signed by Deepak Chopra are commenting to me on what’s happening personally and societally these days and Debbie from Mt. Shasta says we’re on the 99th monkey. Do you know what I mean, she asks. Of course I know what you mean. I live in Ashland.
From a 1950s study, reported by Lyall Watson in Lifetide, this one monkey learned to wash the sand off potatoes so they were edible, then more and more monkeys copied it and when 100 of them were doing it, a critical mass was reached and the practice became species-wide, occurring spontaneously among all monkeys on neighboring islands, though they had no contact with the original group.
It’s a weird combination of pack behavior and something that seems very far afield from pack behavior – telepathy or mystical communion, maybe an act of divine intelligence, somehow shared among them.
That’s what Debbie is hoping for, the 100th monkey. She’s beyond hoping, actually. She knows it’s happening. But what new behavior is being modeled, so it will soon fully catch on in the whole species of this erect-walking, tool-using, year-round-rutting, ego-tripping, overly aggressive, sapient primate?
Well, she says, it’s this new ability, heretofore present only in mutations (known as “sages”), of listening to that still, small voice within, so that each primate is attuned to “perfect light, life and love.”
This leap is created by what created all evolutionary leaps, as Chopra will tell the throngs at World Wellness Weekend here, and that’s intention – both personal and shared in the group mind.
This shift, she says, is very hard because we’re conditioned to listen to the world aka the pack – our fellow monkeys -- and copying whatever most of them are doing most of the time, which we know must be right and proper because everyone’s doing it.
“The truth is that everyone gets ‘it’ already,” she says. But doing it, living it and being it – that’s a whole ‘nuther potato to wash, isn’t it? Especially when most of us monkeys aren’t washing our potatoes at all yet.
Ok, what does everyone already get? She looks at me with the biggest smile on her face. “That it’s all divine and that God is unconditional love.” She gets to Chopra’s table and gets her picture taken with her arm around him as he signs her book.
He’s beyond dogma, she says, gesturing at Chopra. When I read or hear him, I really get it, though of course I already know it.
This is going beyond an interview now. This is a spiritual discussion. So, why is it so hard? Because, she says, it’s easier to learn things than unlearn them. We both report that on this journey there are cycles, waves of dread, shame, depression and that they seem to alternate with the openings and that they’re confrontations with a life of conditioning built on listening to the world instead of the inner voice.
So, what is this inner voice? It’s sure not the mind or ego, not emotions and most certainly not the conscience instilled by society or religion. It’s that in each of us which is that essence, soul, being, which is not just attuned to Divine Intelligence but IS it.
The book-signers are done and I ask Deepak why is the journey so harrowing and lonely so much of the time. He munches his fruit-kabob and waves his hand. “You gotta go through it. It’s best to surrender to it. It’s a great evolutionary step to do it. It’s a dark night of the soul (before dawn) and it requires struggle.”
Ok, more and more primates are washing their potatoes. What’s happening here, on the road from this worried, warring biped to what? To Homo Deus?
“I believe in critical mass,” he says. “It’s a great thing. Never before in recorded history have so many people reached self-awareness. All the political, social, ecological changes depend on the transformation of human consciousness.”
There it is again – SELF awareness. Not awareness of God or some guru or text. It’s right here inside me, the whole understanding of how to wash the potato. I’ve heard it a million times. But suddenly, the hair stands up on my arms: I am the ham radio, the crystal set that receives God -- nay, (as he will later tell the crowd), I am not in the universe; the universe is in me.
That old saying from the Upanishads comes back to me, hey, it’s all Divine and thou art that – except “thou” is not my conditioned ego-mind self. It’s that other stuff that, when we become “self” aware, we become aware of that.
I’m about done, but I want to nail down one last thing. “Ok, why NOW? Why is this all happening now?”
Chopra wipes his mouth and looks at me. “Why NOT now?”
Why the Sorcerer Mocks the Apprentice
Hannah’s homework, a project she’s working on with a small group in Charter School, is Carlos Casteneda’s “Teachings of don Juan,” the bible of my generation in the seventies. Why does the sorcerer don Juan use mockery and humor, she asks, to teach his apprentice, Carlos? Why isn’t he compassionate and supportive, like Socrates, the shaman to Dan Millman in “Way of the Peaceful Warrior?”
I laugh. I can’t help myself. All those long raps about don Juan with guy friends in coffee shops and on wilderness vision quests come back to me, spinning out like movies. Those books were about all we had in the early seventies – plus occasional references to the Tao, Ram Dass, Black Elk Speaks.
Ok, I don’t “really” know why don Juan uses mockery. I just know it works and the answer must be inside me somewhere. He uses it because it jams the mind, scrambles the code, tricks the ego and confuses the sense of ordinary reality, which the egoic mind has spent its life trying to organize, strengthen and, (in my teacherly way, I now pose a question) “what does the ego love most?”
“To be right,” Hannah answers.
“Bingo,” I say. “Why is that so important to the ego?”
“Because, well, it desperately desires to hang onto the world it has created in the mind.” So the Socratic dialog proceeds. Almost all spiritual teachers do this – view the universe as infinite, sacred, magical and ever unfolding, yet viewing the conditioned ego-mind inside us as the chief, nay the only opponent of that universal awareness.
And yet, for most, this task seems insurmountable, heroic, something taking years of stilling the mind in some far-off ashram. Many, like noted Gangaji and her husband Eli Jaxon-Bear, Ashland’s newest resident spiritual author-teachers, journey to the East, India, for the message. Fifteen years ago, they got it.
Why, asks Hannah, do people go to all this trouble? I ask her to read that quote in the introduction to don Juan. It says, “For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to transverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.”
I remember reading that quote for the first time in 1970, hitchhiking around the country from rock festival to commune and feeling the immediate jolt of recognition of that state of walking the path with heart. How that phrase got used! It became a cliché of my generation.
And “looking breathlessly,” that meant, clearly, that you could see (see was always in italics) and it meant, hey, the universe isn’t “out there” – it’s right here in front of us, inside us every moment and if we don’t see (italics) that, we’re locked in jail of ordinary reality created by the ego-mind. Very simple.
So, I’m sitting, talking to Gangaji, who explains, duh, her teaching is “very simple” and “not even teaching” and she’s just another human being, a woman named Toni from Mississippi, who was miserable enough in ordinary egoic reality and wanted out of it bad enough that she did this ritual journey to the east, India, and hung out with Poonjaji a teacher, long enough that, pow, suddenly the veils dropped.
“I was searching for peace,” she said, smiling and speaking in that signature soothing way of hers. “He told me to stop. Just stop and consciously be here and tell the truth. It was a surprise how deep that invitation to stop is – when I stopped thinking about what peace should be and worked from the place of fulfillment.”
So, we all have it already? Right. Forget what you have and don’t have, she says, and find out what’s at the bottom. The bottom? Silence, she says. Freedom. What was here before all this and will be here after all this. This? You, know, the ego, the mind and the seeming world it creates.
Is it just living in the present? No. We already do live in the present, she says. Living in the present can be a great place to hide out. Here and now might be a hellhole of suppressed rage, says Eli. You have to be willing to experience that and everything else if you want freedom. If you want to be who you really are. Which is? “Silent, empty, intelligent love,” says Eli, smiling, as if at the obvious.
You want to sit with them and sip tea all day or maybe all weekend, certain that by the end of that time, if they keep up this, this gently cajoling me out of me ego prison, that I will “receive the transmission,” like they did.
“Papaji (the term of endearment for Poonjaji) saw that I received it. He was successful with me. I’d prayed for a teacher to help me do this. He told me to take it to the West and go door-to-door. I started with small groups in my home.” He gave her a name, Gangaji, after the river Ganges, with ji, meaning “dear.”
It’s a touching story. You realize gurus are getting “it” and spreading it more and more and that it’s increasingly important they do. I always ask consciousness teachers and authors why they think their audiences are growing NOW.
“We’re at a critical time on the planet,” she says. “The preaching has to stop.” Her message is about “loosening up the concepts and realizing any belief finally becomes a trap.”
“They’re useful along the way but finally they’re in the way,” smiles Eli. I wonder who this man is. I ask for details. He’s been with Gangaji 25 years, he went into the Selma and Montgomery civil rights marches as a young, white college student in the mid-sixties and he was hunted by the feds for antiwar activities. Ok, instant respect. He’s got mine.
What’s going on in the world now, he says, is that we’re staggering from longterm “psychic wounds,” like Nazism, Vietnam, 9/11.
He was in New York, his hometown, right after 9/11 and saw something he’d never seen – “incredible openness to the shock of wounding. People were treating people with kindness and enlightenment, everyone the same, not, oh, ok, you’re the doorman and I’m the businessman.
“Amazingly, the immediate message of the government was for everyone to go back to shopping. Let’s paper over the wound,” he says. “We don’t see that deep openness in our culture, that deep healthiness. What we see is a deep unwillingness to deal with our own horror.”
Gangaji nods. “But something’s been shaken up, so possibly something will be born from it. You look at history – where there’s arrogance, there’s a fall. Our whole way of thinking is very arrogant and it’s falling apart at the seams. I mean, my ancestors owned slaves and I was raised to see black people as subhuman. If you don’t face these things, they don’t get healed.”
At their open house, the dozen Gangaji staff who moved here from Marin are practically breathless about one thing – Ashland. It’s stunning to them that people smile on the street and there are no hour commutes.
“You have everything you need here,” said staffer Kelly Vittoria. “We have this trail (White Rabbit) right out our back door!”
Says newly relocated Manju Bazzell, “The impact on my daily life is huge. It’s wonderful to walk downtown. You look at people’s faces and you see they’re so happy, relaxed and enjoying life. I commute five minutes, not 40 and it frees up so much energy that can be used in my life.”
She goes on, as if trying to wake ME up to what I’ve had for 33 years. No, I get it, I really do. Place does matter. I ask Gangaji, ok, why Ashland, besides the fact that everyone at your talk here last summer implored you to live here. “It’s a center of light. I don’t yet know the influence of it, but I’m called to it.”
Liquid Stars for the Young Deity
The “birth of the light” on the Winter Solstice has become the cause for many parties, as it is the only event suggested by nature, the other holidays of the dark months – Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s – being set by decree of Congress, Popes, Roman Emperors or greeting card companies.
Winter Solstice gatherings are usually potlucks with plenty of wine and chocolate to celebrate the pleasure of the days getting longer and they have lots of candles or sometimes a bonfire – the flames being used to celebrate the light, as well as to consume that which needs to be let go of with the old year and with this longest, darkest of nights.
Often, people write their unwanted behaviors, like “unworthiness” or “poverty” on slips of paper and burn them, mentioning this to friends, most of whom are ready to let go of something similar and lend their support. Then they affirm new visions for the year. This is an ancient pagan practice which comes down to us as “new year’s resolutions.”
The new year, as far as the planet is concerned, starts on Solstice -- and Christmas carries on the tradition, going back many millennia B.C., of the ever-youthful savior who brings us natural, divine wisdom and has a magical relationship with some kind of Goddess.
It tracks the earlier myth of Dionysos, who also came out of the East and was called savior, and who was conceived to a human woman by the divine male. He, too, had an irresistible message, often inspired deep emotion and was known to tear families apart, as some went with him, some didn’t.
Christmas Eve is bearing down on us late shoppers. A frustrated V. says she’s “got to get through this,” meaning Christmas and New Year’s, then life or something like it can resume, phone calls will be returned, classes can be signed up for and we can stop thinking about who might be hurt with a forgotten card or present.
“Get through this? You make it sound like a disease,” I respond. It is a disease – like a flu we have to survive, she says. But she goes shopping. I resist. “Resistance is futile,” she says, quoting the Borg of Star Trek. She’s right.
I do a story on Jews, for whom the whole thing is a landslide coming in from all directions, barking about the dominant religion, one not their own. They have to cope with telling their kids they shouldn’t feel inadequate that all the cards, trees, lights and presents are not for them. You have to think about that. I never did.
The best comment comes from Rabbi Zaslow, who says you see a million lights flipped on in little Ashland to celebrate, not Christmas, but shopping, dining out and “holiday cheer,” while the Jews have just one schlemozzely menorah. I have to ask him to define that Yiddishism. He says – a schlemeil is the one who always spills the soup on people, while a schlemozel is the one who gets the soup spilled on him. Got it. He adds, by the way, that even a lot of Christians are not pleased with their big holiday being appropriated for commerce.
Finally we take the kids out to get a tree and lights. V. sees a homeless guy near Shoppin’ Kart and says I’ve got to run in and get him some food. I always do that, she says. Get used to it. Oh, ok, here we go, the real thing. You’re just getting to know someone and you see this and suddenly, there’s this whole dimension of trust that opens up. In a world where most everyone believes food only encourages the homeless, you have someone handing it to them. I don’t ask her why she’s doing it. There is no why.
I’m doing a story in Talent with skaters who want to go snowboarding on Mt. Ashland, using a lot of the same skills as in skateboarding and I hear they got free lessons, rental and ticket from SOS (Snowboard Outreach Society), which is trying to give often edgey-living skaters a taste of nature and life outside the rails and concrete of their urban world.
A dozen went last year, the first year. Did it work? They loved it. But the kids say their families are still poor and they can’t afford the $29 ticket and $28 rental. The program needs money. It’s run through the Boys and Girls Club and Ski Ashland. Call ‘em up and write a check.
We get back home and while the kids decorate the tree, V. and I drink real French champagne aka liquid stars, which she brought to celebrate the new year. You can feel the energy stretching out already, I swear. The universe takes a breath. It brings out the whole question for the new year, not of resolutions undertaken, but of understandings sought and let in.
We talk into the night, this longest night. Why are we here then? It’s not about things we want. It’s about being who we are. We speak of the things that shifted our lives – usually random meetings with people, jobs, loving someone. But what shaped who we are, these seem like gifts from the divine, handed through the veil and these tell us where to take our lives.
The candle burns down, tears are shed, hearts are opened and spoken, the day rises clear and, blessed with champagne and tears, we have started the new year.
The Mystery of the Journeyless Journey
We take the kids to the labyrinth at Unitarian – been doing it for years. They have, I’m sure, many mysterious memories of people walking the winding path in the shadowed, candle-lit darkness, while someone plays the drum, rattles, piano or some strange, stringed instrument, as it moves them.
People are hushed, walking and sitting on the side of the room, thinking, pondering, contemplating. It’s this one good time of the year to do that, although the new solar year is already started. They do it here in the final four days of the calendar year and the first day of the new year.
What’s amazing is that people know what to do. There is no instruction, just an invitation from the ancient labyrinth, to walk to the center. It’s absolutely fascinating, seeing what people do with this, a sacred space, just handed to them, free, open for many hours each night to make as sacred as they want to make it.
When I enter the room, I always feel such an immense sense of relief. Here, at last is a quiet and unmistakably sacred space, a chamber where no one can reach you on the phone, where no one can even strike up a conversation with you, not a long one anyway. They do look at you, though. Right in the eyes. And they smile. Not a big smile. More like a knowing smile, as if to say, can you believe the beauty of this place – not that any “thing” about it is beautiful. It’s not. It’s just a room, with a cloth labyrinth on the floor.
I always marvel at the how of things like this. People write long books and develop arduous seminars all hoping to get you to this place. They usually succeed, but it seems like a big investment in our Protestant-Victorian-Western belief that nothing is gained without much suffering and labor. So, how does this labyrinth do it?
It’s not the building. It’s not the religion normally practiced there. It’s no wise scripture therein. It seems a combination – the time of year (darkest hours, longest nights), the arduousness, mostly unconscious, of treading through these long days of dampness and little light and then the labyrinth itself: a mystery, a puzzle, a quandary, an unanswered question, a center to hold the answer to that question, if…if…if.
If it’s time for you to open your eyes to the answer to that question. If your heart has been hurt enough that it finally can let go, give up, surrender, not care if it’s losing the game, failing the quest – and you just open soul to universe and let them breathe on each other and finally kiss. And then wisdom, that understanding you’ve needed for so long, just passes between them and you mark off your steps out of the labyrinth.
That’s what it’s for. It the goalless goal, the questionless answer, the meaningless meaning, the journey without destination, the act of being present without understanding.
The labyrinth affirms this right off by taking you straightaway nearly to the center, the goal, then diverts you away to these winding, Byzantine switchbacks to nowhere, which serve the purpose of frustrating the mind and ego and all its sense of right-wrong, good-bad, success-failure – and it’s oh-so-dear need for control.
The mind is often petulant, wanting answers, thinking it has posed a good, wise question, which it will get answered and soon. But the more it clings to that, the more it comes up empty-handed -- and tries to pronounce the labyrinth a childish waste of time.
But like all riddles, mazes, myths, koans, it’s meant to be a model of the mystery of life and death itself. Why are we born these delightful, enlightened joyous beings, only destined to many heartbreaks and frustrations (along with the other), then decline into the death of everything we’ve ever thought, done or been?
We don’t know, can’t know, though the religions salve us with promises of better places, provided we find the answer they’ve found. What the labyrinth salves us with is the beauty of living in the mystery, but not knowing the answers.
We used to be happy with that, back before civilization, you can feel it. We know how to walk this labyrinth. We know how to “drop down” into it and let it happen to us. We used to walk the earth this way. Once we were content in its mystery, which we could only witness, deeply feel, occasionally celebrate and know we were so much a part of it that it simply could not be spoken without separating us from it.
Which is where literacy, religion, beliefs and urban life have taken us. Ah, but the labyrinth, just in the past decade, has come back into our lives, a representation of “other,” which reminds us that the other still lives in us, in our cells and in the strange familiarity of the unfamiliar. Indeed, finally, what it teaches us is that it’s all familiar to us and there is no “other.”
Co-Creating the Universe
With Every Thought
One of the beautiful things in that movie, What the Bleep, was the idea of asking the Universe – or whatever name you call the divine and loving intelligence that pervades each and all – for a sign each day that it knows and cares about you and is, in fact, part of you, living, thinking and working with you, happily, eternally -- and with humor.
The next day, driving to the Bean, I say, ok, give me a sign today, one I can’t mistake as coming from anywhere but you. As I get in line for espresso, they’re giving this middle school kid his smoothie and he says he doesn’t have enough money. I, of course, say I will pay for it. He says, hey, you’re Colin’s dad, right? It’s one of my son’s friends I’d not met yet.
The barrista hands me my Americano with steamed half-n-half on top, which, often makes a white pattern against the brown espresso. This foam today has come in the shape of a perfect heart. Our eyes meet and we say wow and break into smiles. Somebody loves you, she says. I practically burst into tears.
It’s not just unlikely, but nearing impossible, isn’t it? The next day, I test it again and with an increasing sense, in the quantum universe we live in, that anything’s possible in an infinite array of possibilities – and that our seemingly separate mind-heart is, in reality so enmeshed in and part of the mind-heart of the God/dess that creates this universe that it isn’t even funny.
So, I ask for the sign again. I’m walking in Medford Goodwill to check out the used books and, as I push on the door, find myself taken by the thought of my dear old friend of 30 years, Wiss, who’d moved to the Applegate years ago and I hadn’t seen her and I miss her and would love to have one of our great talks -- and half way to the books, I glance up and am looking into the face of Wiss. And we have one of our great, old talks, mostly about what just happened and how we co-create the universe at every moment with every thought. And we soo have the choice of what our thoughts are.
Wow, then. What about the mess the world’s in, all the war, pollution, overpopulation, religious hatreds, heartbreaks, global and personal? Are these real or are they just the outcome of thoughts – many people’s thoughts? Should I just deny all this “negativity” and be a bliss ninny, living in my bubble of joy? Should I alternate that with being “honest” about the world mess and the personal mess inside me that I project on the world mess, thus strengthening its seeming reality and confirming that I’m not creating it that way – I’m just being realistic.
Geez. I don’t know. I’ve mastered both. And when reality presents itself in dualities like this, it’s usually just ego-mind yakyak and it’s time to witness it without identification.
So, I take this old friend out to dinner. He’s crashing a decades-old marriage that no one thought was crashable. He’s not doing well, awash in shame for failing. I suggest that all things pass – and have a beginning, middle and end – and that it’s fear-driven conditioning to believe marriage or anything else is a lock through all time.
He says he knows that but…but what, I wonder. A few months later, I bump into my old friend and he pulls me aside to tell me what the “but” was. It was Prozac. He’s on the drug now. It’s really a lot better now, he says, and he had to do it. I face an instant choice – do I support my friend and say, well, I’m glad it’s working for you, or do I tell him what I really think and what he knows I really think, that it’s a culture-wide soul-murder going on.
Maybe he’ll read this, so here’s what I wanted to say: Hey man, you’re SUPPOSED to feel afraid and depressed now. If you aren’t, you just aren’t paying attention. If you’re zoned on meds, you’re not going to be able to co-create the universe and man, it’s never needed it like it needs it now.
Do you think the universe is a done deal, like the major religions say? Do you really think God/dess is sitting up there in the Big Comfort Zone, watching some entirely predictable and controlled electric train set? No way. This edge of fear, anger, shame and depression that we all feel is the cutting edge of creation. It’s the unknown unfolding. And if we are inherent in the quantum mind, that means God/dess doesn’t know any more than we do and is creating and unfolding amid the same assaults of fear, anger, shame and depression that we are.
You will remember that all ancient cultures had deities, including the chief gods and goddesses, who struggled with all kinds of loss, tragedy, foolishness, rage, lust, penance and learning – and that the idea of a solo, perfect God in a completed universe is only a very recent invention and likely an echo of the very human and chickens**t longing to opt out of the game and be taken care of. Which is what Prozac represents – and on a scale unprecedented in history.
I used to laugh at depression and consider myself strongminded, sane and above it. Finally got to experience it a few years ago and while I would sometimes file its edges with wine and cigarettes, I pretty much sat in the fire and said I gotta learn whatever this demon brings. One like-minded friend said, hey, fear and depression – they’re your own stuff and feelings, repressed inside you. And, now, in addition to fear of the stuffed feelings, you have fear created by your own resistance to it, so go for it.
He was right. After each storm, I would find the sails and rigging intact, if tattered, and me shouting at the falling wind – hey, I whipped your ass again, didn’t I?!! Who’s the man?!! C’mon, bring it on, mother humper, izzat your best?!!
Now, in loving Ann, we of course go through all the vales of fear, unworthiness and self-righteous judgings that lovers must know, but this person has also “done her work” and has the callouses from handling the rigging and rudder – and I trust her to sail the weather. I tell her, hey, it’s not about being cured (of being human), it’s about stepping up to the truth at every turn, even if that truth needs to be spoken by the three-, seven- or 13-year old inside of us, called (pardon the cliché) the inner child.
And in fear, we say, ok, here it comes, this is really young stuff here: I’m afraid I suck and you’ll leave me – you won’t do that will you? The other says, how old are you? Seven! Don’t worry, I will never leave you. As a man, I’m conditioned to autonomy and never “needing” anyone (codependence!), but hearing that changes everything. She loves me! She’s going to be here! She knows all of me and yet still loves me! So the terror does not get repressed and that depression doesn’t get nurtured in the nursery of the soul. And we co-create this universe in a new way that I don’t think it’s ever been co-created. And somewhere, maybe God/dess has asked for a sign from this furry, crazy herd of bipeds to which I belong – and, for today, this is that sign.
Joanie: the Last of the Wine
It’s strange how when a person dies, she looks completely different. It shows how, as Krista said, we react, not so much to the facial features, as to the spirit, energy and intent coming through them – or the absence of it.
If I’d recognized Joanie laying dead in the blackberries, I think instead of calling 911, I would have called a lot of friends and had them call their friends and asked them all to bring sage, wine, cornmeal, little Goddess statues, candles and come down for a night of prayers, chants, reading of poems and saying our goodbyes to Joanie in person.
Talk about exposing the community to details of her death. Instead of a few vivid paragraphs in the newspaper written by the only community member to look in her dead face where she lay, we’d all have had the opportunity to engage the body and its lingering spirit on site, as would have been good, right and healing in a sane society, allowing us to move – with her -- through the denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance together.
Instead, the day after the memorial, we do it, as best we can, just us two, Ann and I, the ones who found Joanie. We do it without the body, but not without the spirit. She is still here, in this murky dusk, in her little 6 x12 foot, rough, damp, vine-floored nest by Bear Creek.
It is not a place of peace. We don’t want to be here. We’d put it off for days. It – the finding, the writing, the ritual of release -- is, as Peg writes me, a sacred contract fulfilled between us. I’d come down earlier to mark the spot, as asked by Allison, who wanted to leave flowers and speak her prayers. I’d cleaned out the random junk there, like packages of Depakote, a bipolar med and Mirtzapine, a depression med.
We smudge the place with sage, keenly aware of the feelings of loneliness, pain and despair that had to engulf this dying person -- no doubt clouded and confused by the OD of meds. Would that confusion and despair persist as the spirit sought her way to the Spirit World? We thought so and we felt it.
Ann sprinkles corn meal – a grounding, nourishing staple of life – and places roses where her body had lain. On a driftwood log, we place an earth goddess, pretty stones, ears of corn, all the precious kind of stuff you keep around the house, waiting for a day like this. We open a bottle of Rogue Valley red – this Irish lass was no stranger to the joys of wine – and talk/pray with her, toasting her and sprinkling wine about the space.
What do we say? I don’t know. The words just come. Something like, hey, old gal, we love you and your dazzling presence, love and enthusiasm in our community, your plays, your smiles and hugs and we are here to walk with our arms around you and to call on you now to say goodbye to all the things of this life and go with heart into the spirit world and onto the new life we feel you so eager to get to and, with Goddess’s love, may it be one where you find love with a good partner and children who see how beautiful you are, and a life where you work to change yourself, not the world – and relax into all that love and let it hold you and give to you each day because, baby, you earned it here and you deserve it.
We take out Walt Whitman and let Joanie choose the page it opens to. We read the one starting, “Swift wind! Space! Now I know what is true, what I guessed at…while I lay alone in my bed….My ties and ballasts leave me…I am afoot with my vision” Then he lists pages of the beloved things of everyday life – shop windows, picnics, baseball, kisses, cider, sundown shadows, the splash of swimmers, a cemetery, hummingbirds, on and on.
It is dark now, only the waxing half moon and a candle to light us. The poem is long, but she chose it and I will finish it. Finally, Whitman says, “My right and left arms round the sides of two friends and I in the middle, coming home…by the coffined corpse when all is still, examining with a candle…solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while…speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars…speeding with tailed meteors, throwing fireballs…carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.”
Tears fall over these final lines, the tears, till now, held back. Here, finally, we walk Joanie’s spirit world with her. Truly, Walt, a word-shaman like Joanie, has opened the doors for her. A beat or two of silence, then the coyotes in the hills across the freeway take up their crazy, happy, mournful yowl. They are welcoming her into paradise, says Ann. Yes, she’s crossing over, and as I pour the last of the wine for us and we climb back up to the bikeway, the nest suddenly feels empty. We can laugh again, kiss again, big wet lover’s kisses and we feel her laughing, enjoying them as she leaves.
The wine is gone, all but a half cup that we leave for her. She would appreciate the humor. Printed on the cup is a young girl and the legend, “You’d better not pout.” We are laying half on the Greenway, laying as lovers do, laughing, scourging out, one hopes, the last of the sadness with lover’s joys and a bike whizzes silently by, unlit, driven by a hooded being (Charon, usher of souls?), headed west, the place of the end of journeys. It’s so Joanie -- always knew how to make a grand exit, didn’t she? One that leaves you smiling.
Sprawl: Even That’s in the Infinite Plan
We’re talking about the 100 year old Nazarene church here, doing a story. Sadie was going to this church when Calvin Coolidge was president, she says, and the congregation had to rotate being near the pot-bellied stove. That was on 4th and C, where the Unitarian-Universalist church is now.
The pastor, Jim, pulls out the history. It all got started in the first years of the 20th century, when some people set up a soup mission for the poor and homeless about where Geppetto’s is now. The history mentions “persecution” for that. Why, I ask. Well, it’s the NIMBY (not in my backyard) thing, kind of like goes on now about the homeless, I learn.
We laugh. One of those human nature things, isn’t it? Later, I’m on a story, talking with John Fields, a longtime builder here, and we get off on Ashland growth and housing prices, him saying the Natural History Museum opened up the controversy in the late 80s, with most people saying they wanted to keep the town livable and affordable – and another such attraction would send it off where it has now gone, into being not so much a town as an investment vehicle. One where, if you’re in the investing class, you can live in your investment.
Money goes where it’s comfortable, he says. Well, it’s comfortable here. Back in the mid-eighties, he notes, there were two or three permits issued a year for new houses. Now it’s 400 to 500, he says. The prices of these are $400,000 to $500,000 and aren’t for people who can work here, so a huge majority of people are being displaced.
You can’t control growth, but only direct it – and on the larger scale, it will reach a point of stopping itself and going into die-back, which is how ecology works, he says.
It’s a lovely Saturday in the park, with the first flowers coming out, a day of happiness, nay, ecstasy, by the creek and she says look at that lovely old couple, holding hands. “So touching to see that in old age,” she says. Then we see another old couple holding hands. And another. Y’know, she finally says, I don’t see any young people holding hands. We realize, oh, this is what you get with non-affordable housing – people, as Fields pointed out, rolling over assets from California, hedging inflation and gaining 20 to 30 percent a year on their investment. Now, that’s touching.
What kind of culture does this create? Well, it’s certainly older, whiter and richer, but, as Fields observes, in a candid and courageous assessment, hundreds of people are moving here, all very lovely, pleasant folks, intelligent, liberal people with few problems in their lives, people locked into their own points of view instead of living around real suffering and having to come up with solutions. It’s our generation and we want to see a reflection of ourselves, rather than give to the community. It’s our right to consume and have bigger homes and cars, he says, rather than create a national health plan.
I’m in Central Point listening to social services managers tell a panel of four local legislators how, with massive budget cuts, they’ve had to “thin the soup.” Great new metaphor, isn’t it? The mental health boss from Jo County says he’s thrown the meat and potatoes out of the soup and it’s just water now.
Our town’s legislators, Sen. Bates and Rep. Buckley are broadly hinting that, in a show of supporting local control, a good thing, they are going to set up block grants, so instead of the state giving ample slices to each agency, the county will get a smaller pie – and local social services managers can do the painful slicing. This also takes the heat off the elected people. They’re just handing over a pie, made small by a society privatizing compassion.
One sunny afternoon, in her new home by Ashland Creek, I’m interviewing the famous consciousness author-teacher Gangaji for a magazine story and she says our society has been in a 50-year cocoon of illusion and we may think, after 9/11, that our times have become the worst of times, but this is the way things have always been – the aggressive, primate acquisitiveness and violence, leading to a quickening, an exit from denial and discovery of the truth.
What is the truth? It’s what was here before thought and will be here after it – that we are awareness, consciousness, love – and the divine.
She smiles. The development of the brain has been very useful, she says, but at a certain point, it’s counterproductive. We’re ruining our nest and killing ourselves and the shock of that will be a catalyst to knowing we are not these thoughts and this body, but what’s under that, love.
We leave, walking out into the sun. She’s right, of course. It’s all in the Infinite Plan, isn’t it?
The New Paradigm: a Gaian Spirituality
They come together, these sacred leaders and seers, to feel their way toward a new spirituality, one that takes in some major pieces left out of religions for the last couple millennia – the earth, the feminine and the idea of universality, meaning I am not identified just with “my” religion, but see all humanity as very much belonging to the same spirituality.
Sound like some New Age neo-pagans? No, it’s the people of Jewish renewal – and Saturday night at Ashland High School’s theater, they asked themselves and members of other religions to talk about a “new cosmology needed for planetary healing” and also to do a candid report card on “what’s not working” with their own religion and how it could change.
The main engine of Jewish renewal over the last half century, 80-year old Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (“Reb Zalman”) was candid, calling for a secular, not supernatural ethic. The earth is teaching us, he says. The cosmos is the body of God. We are becoming Gaian citizens (Gaia is the ancient Greek goddess of Earth).
“The only way we can get it together is together,” he says. We’re all cells in the totality of one body. Ram Dass and Timothy Leary gave us a gift – of losing our narrow, provincial experience, something Reb Zalman confirmed with his first LSD journey, he says, “seeing religion from the inside,” seeing that every tradition has these “heart filled” visions.
Reb Zalman calls it a Gaian ethic. It’s what’s going to heal us. “What has happened is that we’ve been broken apart,” he says, referring to the whole of humanity. Our social fibers have been shredded, we’re in exile and we have things like nuclear families, single mothers, bastard children (no mother would use that word). “It’s like a bad immune system,” he says.
He’s speaking gently, warmly, smiling in his white beard, saying so many new and radical ideas that you have to glance at your neighbor and suggest, did he really say that? But here he is, a respected patriarch of the Jewish community for many decades, the spiritual father of Ashland’s Havurah, crying out for a new person on the earth – and modeling that person.
Patriarch, smchmatriarch. He relinquishes all father-right. We need matriarchs, not patriarchs, he says. The era of religious triumphalism is over. Wow, you don’t need that term defined for you. You can feel it. Religious pride, the sense that you, in your major, organized religion, with a billion adherents, are chosen and have the inerrant word of God in your book.
And sitting on your pillow, meditating (alone), that’s not going to make the necessary changes for the world, either, he says. How about more blessing of one another and of other and of the planet?
This man has to be the Martin Luther of the Judaic faith and he’s not just nailing some theses on the door of his own temple, but of every temple.
Anne Bartlett has a hammer, too. She’s the one who led her flock into creation of the downtown labyrinth, next to her church, Trinity Episcopal. We are hard-wired before birth, she says, for relationship with “Other,” which means other people and God, this within a cosmos that she defines as “an ordered luminous web of interconnections, infused with divine purpose and plan,” something that isn’t about living in different, competing religions.
We (Christians), she says, have been in trouble with this triumphalism thing since Constantine opened up an era of genocide in the name of religion and “trampled on the souls of others,” something that’s not over yet. Christians, she notes, need to start listening, forgiving and practicing some humility. To big laughter and applause, she quotes Desmond Tutu, who said, hey, God is not a Christian.
What is God? “God is a mystery – and we need to understand Her as best we can,” she says. Any Christian minister who writes a Good Friday sermon, should be required to run it by a rabbi first, she adds – to much laughter. Our hope, she concludes, is that God can be trusted to being new spiritual life out of a global situation of death and despair.
Sound dark and negative? It wasn’t. You had to be there. The crowd (sold out) was loving it – and approaching it as a serious and menacing planetary crisis that we have the power to change, rather like citizens gathered to deal with a flood or plague. This is real. We’re in trouble. It’s especially grim now, in a nation pumped up about saving the world from evil, violent terrorists, all of whom just happen to be of a different religion.
“We’ve got to try and stop the spiritual blindness,” says Agnes Baker Pilgrim, the local Takelma elder. We’ve got a journey to make, one of only 18 inches, from head to heart, so we can take on a role given us by the Creator, the care of all creatures created before us. She says it simply: think of community first – and the generations ahead of us.
We’re not here to have a lot of material gain, power and prestige, but to learn the lesson of love, says Dr. Krishna, a Hindu. Love must come with respect or love is false love. We’re speaking in the elemental building blocks of consciousness and values here, but it’s so rare that we hear these things in this jingoistic consumer culture, that they sound novel, almost radical.
It’s difficult to hold to the universal view that we’re one planet and we are not alone, say Ashland’s Tibetan Buddhist lamas, Yeshe and Pema. We have many lives to get it right and we do so by living simply, practicing contentment and harming no being. Calm down, says Pema, stay in the present, rest in the openness of your mind, don’t be tyrannized by the compulsion to think and “all should go smoothly on the spiritual journey and you need not panic.”
What we’re being presented with here is the greatest sociological transformation ever known, one in which the economy can become a satellite to the “soul of the culture,” instead of the other way round, says author-philosopher Jean Houston, now of Ashland. The “reset button of history” has been hit and we face the most profound task of any people who have ever lived.
You talk to people about this stuff and they all say they know it’s happening. Life is a lot different than it was, say, at the end of the last century – and 9/11 plus the disputed 2000 election, while not earth-shattering in themselves, were two huge body blows that put all this on the table and greatly accelerated the process.
The sponsor of the weekend, Havurah’s Rabbi David Zaslow owns that the direction pointed out by Reb Zalman, and followed by his own flock, is mystical, a loaded word that means, “It’s not enough to serve and worship God. Renewal is the understanding that God resides in every one of us as a direct experience of the divine, a direct encounter.”
The ecstatic experience of the divine, brought in by dance, song, prayer (and an inclusive view of world as cosmos) holds firm to the cultural identity, while letting go of what’s dysfunctional in the religion – usually the negative role of women and outsiders and the lack of connection to nature. The emerging new trinity, Zaslow says, is self, Gaia (nature) and God – and you can’t have one without the other.
Rumi: Toward a 21st Century Soul
In doing a research paper on Rumi, my daughter learns that this 13th century Persian Sufi mystic is now the best-selling poet in America. It’s not hard to figure why.
The lovers drink wine night and day.They drink till they tear away the veils of mind andmelt the layers of shame.When in Love, body, mind, heart and soul don't exist.Become this, fall in Love, and you won’t be separated again.
Her thesis, which she has to argue and defend in a senior paper, is that so many people read and love Rumi now because you can never tell if he’s talking about the fleshly lover or the divine – and because so many people today long for a spirituality that encompasses all beings and all life through all time. Not just the ‘saved’ people. Not just our people. Not just in heaven. But now, here, everyone.
Kurt Katzmar smiles. Yes, he’s responsible for a lot of those Rumi sales, he says. He’s the new minister at Medford’s Congregational United Church of Christ, this after four years as classical DJ at Jefferson Public Radio here, and he’s talking about taking the flock in new directions to a spirituality that supports how we’re all one, interrelated with each other and all nature, in God and if we don’t get that, we’re not going to last.
You get there by doing your “inner work.” You get there by a process called metanoia, he says, which means you change direction, turn around and face God. It’s not about just assenting to a political or spiritual doctrine and “blustering” about it. It’s work. You change. You do “gregoreite,” a Greek word that means you stay awake.
The old Seven Sisters of Protestantism have always been that way. They’ve been sidelined -- they offer very few simple answers, and they insist you do your work, he notes. What is that work? The sayings of Jesus give clues, he says, such as that saying that the realm of God is within you. That’s a big one.
And that it’s not about looking good, he says, after all, the Son of Man, says Luke, “has come eating and drinking and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” We have a good laugh about that one. Google Rumi and wine together and you get 152,000 hits – and, while he’s no stranger to wine, you also know he means wine as a metaphor for the ecstasy of spiritual oneness.
God has given us a dark wine so potent that,drinking it, we leave the two worlds…
There are thousands of winesthat can take over our minds.
Don't think all ecstasiesare the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God.His donkey was drunk with barley.
Every object, every being,is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,and taste with caution.
Any wine will get you high.Judge like a king, and choose the purest,
the ones unadulterated with fear,or some urgency about "what's needed."
On Nov. 1 word has spread and over 100 people show up for the first Dia de los Muertos march in Ashland, doing dances and rituals outside Briscoe School, all painted up like skulls, watching children dance, writing our wishes on scraps of paper and burning them so they go up to the dead and they will help us, then trekking over to A Street Marketplace for songs, then to a cemetery to honor those who went before.
It’s a Mexican holiday, but this is being taken up by mostly Anglos, who seem to want a purpose and reason for the Halloween time, one besides simply dressing up crazy. It brings up thoughts and wishes for our departed beloved, whose pictures are pasted up on the Briscoe wall. The veil is the thinnest, they say, between this world and that of the dead and they come near and we show them, with our painted skulls that we are not afraid of the world they live in – and that we will someday live in.
It is the season when the American death toll of the pointless war went over 2,000 and a nation regained its voice, filling the local letters to the editor columns with a cascade of disapproval from all parts of the valley, not just liberal Ashland -- and we gather for Thanksgiving knowing no calls to patriotism and victory (over what?) can bring back majority support for this misguided policy.
It was a season when the press, too, began to regain its voice, after four years of softball with a president seeming to respond to external menace – a theme acted out in “Good Night and Good Luck.” In this movie of pioneer tv newsman Edward R. Murrow’s battle with McCarthyism, 20 years before Watergate, we see the man who set the archetype of courageous journalist battling not just the powerful, dishonest politician, but the fear of antagonizing the patriotic and losing advertising revenues and careers.
Each generation of journalists seems to have to win this struggle for itself, as does the public that again learns the hard lesson -- “united we stand” won’t get it and, in a democracy, we finally have to read the news, learn the issues and think for ourselves.
Giraffe Cures Soul Loss
The rain kept coming and the sound of it flying sideways onto the windows all night went well with the mixture of black and mint tea and reading to each other in bed. We thought it would be great to get a head-to-toe rain suit and hike in it, then sit and let it hit you full body, but we were too chicken and it was fun enough to drive the kids up and down the creek, standing on the banks, inches from the plunging whitewater, speculating if we could walk across the creek without getting swept away, which we assured the kids - you couldn’t and don’t even think of trying.
And here it was New Year’s Eve again, recalling the flood on this night eight years ago, when we were celebrating in the old Primavera Restaurant and looked down and noticed our feet were in an inch of water – soon to gut the Plaza and have us all using portapotties in front of Safeway and showers in semi trucks by the college.
Friends complain about the day-after-day rain, one saying he might have to resort to drink and I think, imagine if a storm like this – as Longfellow said of spring – came once a century, “what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!”
It is a slight cruelty that Monday should come the day after New Year’s and it inspires us to take off to the Collins Tea House in Jacksonville for some newly-baked Danish goodies and to play hooky for the day, impulsively buying each other rings in the Sacred World store, presenting them to each other with much flair and tenderness in front of the Jville tavern – and spending the hours over tea talking about “soul retrieval,” apropos the lecture of Annie Fuller the night before at Metaphysical Library.
It’s something shamans do. They’ve got soul and they find yours. They get a power animal and, to the accompaniment of drums and rattles, go on a shamanic journey with this creature, who is a friend or ally in the spirit world, a being who helps you heal ailments in self or other, find answers to important questions or obtain a vision necessary for a good life.
The Metaphysical Library is packed and by a show of hands, most of them had done shamanic journeying and soul retrieval. How did it feel, Annie asks, getting a missing piece of your soul back? Wonderful, they say, whole, like a huge stress or depression is lifted off you. Like something missing is found.
She tells stories of “soul loss,” usually traumas like car wrecks, breakups, death of a loved one, rape, war – times when, in an act of self-preservation, some part of you says, ok, folks, I don’t want to be here, so maybe I’ll catch you later and maybe not. Once, she says, a person got in a bad collision and after recovering from burns and injuries, was never the same. Nagging fear, sadness, not really trusting in life. Our term for it is post-traumatic stress. Theirs is soul loss.
So Annie journeys with her and the power animal guides her to the spot of the accident and finds part of the soul of this person in a bunch of rocks off the side of the road and brings it back and the shaman blows it into her – and “that missing something” is no longer missing.
But of course, we say over our tea, it only makes sense. It’s a bit childlike, kind of something out of the Lion King or Narnia, but then, that’s the charm, isn’t it? It’s so innocent, this act of having an invisible playmate, an animal who is always there for/with you, who takes you for magic healings of woundings inflicted in the harsh world of adult humans.
It’s like that Thomas Moore Book, “The Reenchantment of Everyday Life.” I think reading that title was worth the price of the book. And everyone here at this lecture wants that – that, as Buffy St. Marie once sang, Goddess is alive, magic is afoot.
Someone asks what about drugs, do they help? She and many others say, no, it just confuses things and brings in too much we can’t handle. Magic is already here. It’s part of life already and all the indigenous peoples – including us civilized folk – knew that in tribal times and worked with it and respected it and were loved and cared for by our “imaginary playmate” animals, of whom the teddy bear, taken to bed and loved through the years, is a faint echo.
We play a game over our tea: ok, name five times when you could have had soul loss. It’s easy to name them. Most aren’t accidents, but rather, relationships stuff – loss, pain, betrayal, misunderstanding -- with those we loved, including the act of our births, which we knew was done in hospitals, with forceps pulling on our heads, with mom bonked on drugs.
So, how would an animal, let alone a “spirit animal,” know or care about us and want to help heal us? Well, it’s the idea that not only all people are connected, but all life is connected or, as this random quote, from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, just now appearing in my email, notes, “The Bible reminds us that when one part of a body is in pain, the whole person feels it. If anyone is living less than a proper human life, we’re all poorer for it.” In short (Donne), no man is an island.
I guess that’s why my helpful spirit giraffe has done so much for me, for so long. He feels it, too, and like the teddy bear I had as an often hurting little kid, he wants to make it all better.
Ritual Labor in the Mountains
The snow has just dusted Griz and the foothills this Sunday morning and sunlight has made it all dazzling. After coffee at Evo’s, Colin, who just got his learner’s permit and has in the space of four days become better than me at driving a stick, wants to cruise off into the country, up by Payne Cliffs. We get out and hike around. They tower above us, these sandstone monuments, once the seabed for the Pacific which lapped its shores right here 100 million years ago.
We come across one of those huge piles of basalt rocks that randomly dot the hills up there. Were they piled by ranchers, so cattle could graze? I think not. In doing research for the Crater Lake documentary, I’ve found anthropological reports that the natives here would go off into the wildness on vision quest and do “ritual labor,” piling branches or rocks for days on end, a practice that empties the mind of everyday thoughts and frees the consciousness to receive understanding from Great Spirit.
Wow, they say, you mean each one of these rocks was touched by an Indian? Well, they were here for at least 10,000 years, I say, so they touched everything. I wonder if they would mind us taking a rock with us, says Hannah. Ask them, says I. How do you do that, she says. You ask and you wait for a sign – usually it’s a bird. At that moment, three meadowlarks swoop down and land in a little tree in front of us and begin singing their delightful song. Our mouths drop open at this “whoa” moment. Our little vision quest has been fulfilled and we go on our way, each with a little rock to cherish – a sign from the first people here.
I’m telling the story that evening as I make dinner with Ann and Krista and I get to the part about, “you ask for a sign and wait – usually it’s a bird – and at that moment…” And at that moment Ann’s clock strikes 6. It’s a bird clock, with a different bird singing its song for each hour. And it sings throatily, joining in the story. Mouths drop open. Is this getting more common, these “agreements from the world around us,” as the Yaqui medicine man don Juan called them? We smile and nod at this little miracle. But really, when you ponder it, what doesn’t confirm the presence of Great Spirit – what isn’t a miracle?
I take Hannah with me on a story at Denman Wildlife Area, those little known 1,860 acres of wetlands, desert, riparian areas, oak groves -- crammed with egrets, otters, eagles, beavers, packed between the freeway, the Hwy 62 strip and the factories of White City. The photographer spots a grebe swimming like mad but oddly staying in one place, just 10 yards in front of us. It has to be snared in fishing line – no other possible explanation. We’re with Jim Hutchins, who started Oregon Stewardship many years ago, to teach school kids and others about how we’re all connected and all need our habitat and clean air and water.
We pause about 30 seconds, until it becomes clear: someone is going in that freezing water and have a duck moment. Jim goes. The tired, freaked out grebe bites him and thrashes in the water, diving and coming up, but Jim gets her free and she swims off underwater, surfacing half way across the pond.
I share the story with friends at a gathering on Feb. 2, that midway point between solstice and equinox, known as Brigid’s Day, the time when Celts would light all the candles and welcome the first shoots of spring and the freshening of ewes. Its remnants are celebrated here as Ground Hog Day. We don’t have any ewes but we welcome the first lilting moments of spring’s warmth with spring cleaning and throwing open the door to call in the Irish mother goddess Brigid.
In a quieter moment, I cruise the internet looking for stories on the state of nature, as it’s allotted only its one percent of space in the mainstream media. Here’s Bill Clinton speaking in Switzerland at a gathering of corporate giants on – what are the big problems facing us all. Well, he says, it’s global warming, as only that has the potential to “end the march of civilization as we know it and make a lot of the other efforts that we’re making irrelevant and impossible.”
Really, now. And this is on some obscure eco-website, I mean, let’s not devote a lot of front page press to global warming and Clinton. We’ve heard all this. But Clinton is smart, the smartest of the dozen presidents from FDR on, if we can believe the Lovenstein Institute survey. They put him at IQ 182. Carter is 175, JFK is 174, wily Nixon is 155, FDR is 147, Johnson is 126, Ford is 121, Reagan is 105, Bush Sr. is 98 and the current guy is 91.
What are problems number two and three in Clinton’s estimation? The concentration of wealth in a few hands while most of the world, including the middle class now, scrapes out a living – and the “apparently irreconcilable” religious and cultural differences behind terrorism. A gnarly knot there, the so-human needs to leave a trail of carbon dioxide, accumulate bookoos of bucks and get down in absolute righteousness about our particular fast-track to God – regarding others as not just misguided, but blasphemous.
I’m on a story with Bahá'í people. Much persecuted by the fundamentalist regime in Iran, they explain their belief in the ultimate unity and peace among all religions and all mankind. I read mad Beat poet Charles Bukowski, who warns against any belief in the perfectability of man and publishes books with titles like Love is a Dog From Hell and You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense.
Even the titles are funny and somehow grounding. They give you hope to experience what’s real – and you get that you wouldn’t want to bet the farm on the perfectability of humanity any time in the near future, even after we learn our hard lessons from all the crises Clinton fears.
We’ll stop spewing CO2 when we run out of stuff to burn. We’ll stop ripping off the poor when they all get tired of being ripped off and do something about it. And we’ll stop whacking people who trash our God when, over time, we gradually start making love with them, marrying them and having kids with them.
What if the World has Soul?
I’m having lattes with M. and she’s buying and she presents a big shopping bag full of new books for review and I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have someone hand you a big bag of new books to read and review for her magazine.
We settle in at our table, sharing all kind of stories of the many months since we talked and I sort the books into piles – relationships, environment, political, conspiracies – and we start talking about love (ours, with our partners) and that enduring, naïve question of Freud’s: what do women want?
Everything, I respond, and they should and must have it. The woman at the next table, her fingers freeze on her laptop and you know she never has and never again will hear a man say that. Ya, I expound, working the issue, women should get all they want, even if man can’t understand that, and, above all, they should get endless showers of adoration, attention, approval and affection, since they are not just symbolic of the sacred feminine, but are it.
M. says men and women are equal and should share equally. But I’m talking about what comes from the heart – women need all of that from a man. It’s hard to put it in a political context that contains p.c. stuff like equality, fairness, mutuality, but it’s essentially on the mark. Men are not equal to women. And there is no other way the world can work but by undoing patriarchy in its entirety. Women contain the wisdom of the world, the Soul of the World, aka the goddess Sophia (wisdom), as Robert Sardello puts it in his “Facing the World with Soul.”
I found this man’s book at a yard sale, which is a process I submit to, of letting the Universe or fate school me. I never heard of him. But all his books have the word “soul” in the title and contain phrases like this: “The impulse leading to the desire to bring about a correction of a one-sidedness of psychology issues from the observation that the place where therapy needs to be practiced has shifted from the isolated chamber of the psychotherapist’s office to the world.”
Whoa. I love this. I like sentences that need to be re-read. I get it. He’s saying psychology is over and our shrink is – the soul of the world. Sardello goes on, “Medicine, education, money, food, energy, media, technology, religion, buildings, economics, all those organizing forms that together might make culture, no longer do so, but instead are making a pathological civilization.”
This is written in 1992, a long time ago. It’s a sweeping, condemning indictment. Is it true? Well, the buildings are gnarly, the medicine, education, food, media, ok, not much better. The economics work for the rich, but that can’t be sustained. Ok, can’t argue with this.
“The new symptoms,” he says, “are fragmentation, specialization, expertise, depression, inflation, cruelty, hardness, violence and absence of beauty. Our buildings are anorectic, our business paranoid, detached and abstract, our technology manic. These symptoms indicate the loss of the containment characteristic of the vessel of the soul.”
Which is a wordy way of saying we’ve lost our soul. Got it. And, he adds, Sophia, as in ancient times, is the world soul and is still here and, though most people seek to save their soul as individuals, whether New Age or Christian, we can only save our soul in concert with the world soul, together, and that’s what we’re starting to do and it’s very hard.
We celebrate Valentine’s, with a long morning at the Bean Scene, across from the college, where the barista makes little hearts on your cappuccinos. I suspect it’s an artificial Hallmark holiday, but Ann looks it up in Barbara Walker’s Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets. Ok, it’s not artificial, but another martyr-saint day, papering over of the ancient Lupercalia, honoring the she-wolf who suckled Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus and indeed was marked, as it is now, by the exchange of pieces of paper with people’s names on them -- and you get to bed down with whoever’s name you draw. Dang, will those randy pagans ever learn?
Meanwhile, Condi Rice asks for 20 mil to pressure Iraq. I mean, that’s enough to send 20 kids all the way through college now. Our bill for Mideast wars goes past 200 bil – and lordy, Bush asks cuts of 12 bil in aid to struggling college students, who already were going to spend their whole careers in service to the lending industry. Thankee massah, for whatever help we working poor can get for our chilluns.
And, in talking to the R candidates for governor of this beaver state, one finds they are still, in mimicry of the Great Communicator, 25 years later, running against the government, this while they’re using it to hand tax funds to the wealthy – and draining the blood from public education, saying it’s harmful to R children, who need home schooling, vouchers (that is, tax money) and charter, ie, fundamentalist schools to shield them from a degenerate, pagan society.
And the veep, while hunting tiny little birds without a license, instead nails a fat cat GOP contributor, not a rare species, but certainly fat enough to see in Texas scrubland, and doesn’t see fit to report it to police, let alone the uppity press or electorate – any more than they would step forward about holding Gitmo prisoners without bail, or doing illegal wiretapping or reading of our emails at their pleasure.
Meanwhile, a trip around the internet this morning reveals a million dollar bounty offered for the head of the artist who triggered the Muslim cartoon riots, another milestone in the history of God – and CalTech reports the Greenland ice sheet, in response to global warming caused by us busy bipeds, is undergoing mechanical breakup and melting into the sea twice as fast as five years ago, thus confirming bipeds are getting twice as dumb, twice as fast as previously thought. The Soul of the World weeps.
Karma: Drop by Drop Comes Wisdom
Practically unheard of in the vacuum of tv programming is something about karma and how to heal it, but “My Name is Earl” is bringing just that, to millions on Thursday evenings, albeit with characters seemingly in the 50 to 70 IQ range. But that’s tv. They assume we’re really dumb, because after all, we are watching tv. Which is really dumb.
Earl has a long list of things he’s done all his life and runs about the country trying to make amends, pay debts or at least apologize. Karma is illustrated in how, when he doesn’t fix a bus stop sign he runs over, he gets stung by bees and so does the potential girlfriend he’s romancing.
Over long lattes, Ann and I explore karma, which is the Hindu-Buddhist concept of how over many lives we have to suffer through the results of our actions, while often blaming life or others and rarely getting it that we are responsible for that suffering.
So, in our denial, we speculate: look at all the so-called bad things happening to good people, which of course includes us – and in the big picture, the bad things that have happened to America, which we think of as a bunch of good people.
I say, y’know, when you look at it that way – what if every tragedy, big or small is a reaction to some thoughtless, selfish, arrogant or even cruel action – it’s not hard to connect the dots at all, and to realize all the ways the two extremes balance each other.
Our group of boys has bullied another boy, say his parents. The boys dismiss it, saying they only said a few offhand mean things. But the boy experienced it as traumatic. Has it produced karma? Yes, of course it has. We look back over our lives and recall in younger years – teens, twenties – the ease with which we hurt others and don’t listen to their hurt. It all seems so easy when we’re young. Dues and paybacks are for suckers. If I dodge fast enough, I can run between the raindrops.
Someone emails quotes from lawyer Clarence Darrow of monkey trial fame, who notes that your parents ruin the first half of your life and your children ruin the second half. We guffaw heartily. After all the love and hugs we gave those kids? Ha, but what a symmetrical balance with how we blamed our parents for what they did to us (as did just about everyone I know, including me).
Of course, the kids don’t really ruin our lives. They just insist on going off and making most of the same mistakes we did, despite how we raised them so much more skillfully than our parents raised us – and we hoped this would spare them the suffering we had.
But it doesn’t. If they didn’t have any need for lessons – which is another way of saying karma – they probably wouldn’t be here.
Up comes the model of the Kennedy clan, legendary for heights of glory, class and power, then having it shattered in seemingly random violence and agony. Ann says, ok, look at the patriarch Joe Kennedy, the rage against treatment of the Irish a century ago, the rapaciousness with women behind his wife’s back, the tyrannical demands that his sons wrest the highest political power in the land.
Karma, when it comes, seems to be about hunkering down with lessons we don’t want to learn and paybacks we don’t feel we deserve. After his brother was shot, Bobby Kennedy did that. As America descended into the Vietnam War, carried out by the Texan who replaced JFK, how on earth could he, his brother or America deserve it?
Bobby would recite the tragic line from Aeschylus, “Even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Then, as he approached the pinnacle of power, he was shot, right after Martin Luther King, leaving the country to ponder ever more deeply the workings of wisdom that comes through suffering.
Weirdly, I’ve been writing stories of local ghosts, interviewing many people who are unquestionably sane – and who’ve seen ghosts sitting on the end of their bed or peeking around a corner. Universally, they say the ghosts are friendly – and almost always of the same gender, age and dress as someone who died there tragically and undeservedly and, one supposes, didn’t have time to review the wisdom that would that would come to them by the awful grace of God.
You get a feel for these ghosts. They’re hanging out a long time. Far from wanting to hurt or scare anyone, they have the feel of people reflecting and trying to absorb their lessons – no longer resisting the twist of fate that laid them low. It’s all about the learning and growing and reflecting on how, despite any tragedy, pain and loss, we’re here to be present, to listen and experience with others, to let it sink in and know them, as if it were us in their shoes at every step.
Which brings us to the cartoon riots and how most Americans, including me, find it a lot easier to resist what the Muslims are saying, focusing only on how Americans love free speech and would not menace anyone for what they said or printed about their deity. That’s true for us, but it isn’t true for them and they’re deeply offended that we don’t want to experience them and what they’re saying.
And as long as we comfort ourselves with the belief that 9/11 happened for no good reason, out of the blue – and we had nothing to do with it and played no part in causing it – then eventually the day will come when, drop by drop, in our own despair, against our will, that understanding and wisdom will come to us by the awful grace of…whatever divine presence you believe handles that.
If I Knew Where I Was to Die,
I Never Would Go There
It’s always said that two things are inevitable, death and taxes. The Republican investor class has disproved the latter and a group of consciousness freaks is working on the former, including ex-sixties radical Rennie Davis, who is lecturing here regularly.
Rennie, an impish genius now, as he was in his Chicago Seven days, says humanity invented death and we have the power to un-invent it. Something about that statement rings true, though it seems to defy logic. Humanity has a tremendous loyalty to death – and has an enduring, though unconscious urge to “cross over,” as the jargon goes now, to the “other side.” Why? All religions tell us it’s better there, a paradise with no bills, heartbreaks, upsets of any kind, pollen allergies, spam, grass to mow, oil to change, nothing aggravating. Some religions even throw in lots of beautiful virgins – always a selling point to guys. But it’s for suckers, and Rennie calls its faithful “the deads.”
Death is a grave mistake, joked Leonard Orr back in the seventies. Lecturing, rebirthing and teaching Physical Immortality at his Sierraville resort, he would say the belief in the inevitability of death is the master negative thought driving all the other ones. I mean, how would you like to wake up every day and remember that the same god who gave you this lovely body, this lovely world, your lovely children and your lovely lover intends to take it all away in a fairly short time by killing you? It’s depressing. It’s not fair and we’re angry about it, yet we’re supposed to worship and love the deity who set this up?
With death always hanging over our shoulder like a mean schoolmaster, we salve ourselves with fairy tales, like dead people go to a “better place” to be with a loving deity, even though it’s a place with no wine, chocolate, espresso, movies, spring, babies, sex or other great stuff we have here on this imperfect but wonderful planet.
But, at it’s core, our chumminess with death comes from how it resembles the womb, a warm, groovy place where a parent figure takes care of us and we don’t do much, but that’s ok, because we don’t have any annoying responsibilities and there’s nothing scary that can happen to us and, well, there’s no death.
Leonard pointed out that, while we people into self-improvement increasingly take power over self-image, goals, healing, prosperity, positive relationships and such, we don’t challenge death. But it’s there to be challenged, I realized immediately when Leonard stuck this in my face almost 30 years ago, and I’ve worked with it “as if true” ever since.
I love studying myth and ancient cultures and almost all of them before the dawn of patriarchal, monotheistic religions had a myth of the Golden Age. It’s there in the Upanishads, Bible, Ovid – a time of people who knew all truth and lived it, including, not just a oneness with the gods, but knowing there’s no difference between us and the gods. We had power over death – or rather, over life. We lived as long as we wanted, many centuries and left, not because of the ravages of time but when everything was completed.
Even if these ideas are rubbish, I realized, they won’t shorten my life, but can only extend it – and they relieve a huge burden of dread, isolation, helplessness and grief.
The paradox of loyalty to the inevitability of death is that it makes you sick, literally. The stress and dread of it trashes the immune system, so guess what happens? In self-fulfilling prophecy, you become host for more and more diseases. These wear you down, you “age” and die. A joke among physical immortalists is that the belief in the inevitability of death has killed more people than all the wars and diseases combined. We look around and notice that all people have died and we take that for irrefutable proof that our loyalty to death is well placed.
But vast numbers of people are gullible about all sorts of rubbish. Like the inevitability of taxes. Republicans have brushed aside that supposedly immutable law. Let’s put the other one in its place.
One Day, as Apollo, Obviously
Inhabiting a Statue, Spoke to Me
Once, wandering through the national museum in Athens, preoccupied with bus and ferry schedules, culture shock and bad souvlaki churning in the gut , I found myself staring vacantly at a statue, one of scads abounding.
Maybe it was the emptying of my mind, the letting go of controls in a strange land, but as the moments passed, the marble visage, most of whose nose and mouth had been smashed off over time, began to somehow be animated, filled with some ineffable life or spirit or consciousness.
I began to realize that if there were a face that held the essence of all the best in all men’s faces, this would be the one. I stepped back and read the tag – oh, the god Apollo. He was experienced, had been loved and looked to for, well, what I was seeing now, the highest that can be attained to in men: wisdom, patience, strength, suffering with poise, yet dedicated with every cell and thought to some mission that defined him.
I felt changed. I felt a door had been opened, that, through the perfect arch of his brow, the set of his full lips, the inestimable stillness and depth of his eyes, I was shown the full range of what’s possible, now, as a man, fully engaged in life but imperturbable by wealth, glory, hearts won or lost or some heaven.
It lasted maybe 30 seconds and then, at once, it was just another ancient statue. I thanked him. And I realized, that’s why they made so many statues. They were not adornments or achievements of “art” as we know it. They were essentially transmitters of the divine essence immanent in the universe – and it was the sculptors’ task to use the very stone of the earth to bring that to people. He did not succeed because he was skilled and a genius but because he could submit himself to that journey. I’m sure our concept of art today, the ego trip, the galleries, the investing and owning it, would be thought puzzling, even wicked to them.
As the bloom of understanding, the gift of seeing, receded like a tide, I thought of the words of Shakespeare, in Hamlet, words I often chant when in despair of humanity – “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
At the Jefferson Center for Religion and Philosophy this past weekend, I hear them try to sort out the conflicts of science and spirit, concluding, since they’re all liberals, that we’re better off with Darwin than doctrine – and his teachings, which have never caused a war, can be proven by repeatable experiments with fast-breeding fruit flies, so if you’ve got fire-breathing gods with all the right rules for living, keep them to yourselves, please.
One physicist from Missouri says it’s all just atoms bouncing around – and all we see, the universe, is a product of chance and necessity. I ask, you mean you don’t sense any intelligence or vision behind any of this? Nah. A lot of stuff happens and a small percent of it gets used. I think about this all weekend and decide there’s a third vector at this intersection – intent. Visions, dreams. The stuff humans have going on in their vague wishes, their druthers, their longings, their fears.
And in our apprehension, how like a god we are! In fact, if there is intelligence, intent and creative impulse going on anywhere in this universe, then it must be going on everywhere, a fact that sculptor knew when he dipped into the river of essence to draw out those essentially male energies that 23 centuries later would blow away and change a young American tourist forever.
We’re All Divine Sages
I couldn’t find it, so I went out looking for it, stalking the streets, letting whim guide me here and there, into Goodwill, BiMart, up an down the main drag. The “it” I am looking for is that elusive, usually sentimentalized, grossly exploited thing called Christmas Spirit – which is supposed to be a giddy, blessed, childlike abandonment of the normal hurried, self-centered, worried, grabby, type-A personality we have the rest of the year.
But it’s also real or we wouldn’t bother with Christmas. It’s that thing you see all through “It’s a Wonderful Life,” even though Jimmy Stewart many times grinches out, bitterly muttering “Why did we have all these kids!?” But in the end, it’s through the loss of all his cash that he finds there IS community and everyone loves him and all his years of seeming drudgery have sown the seeds of something real and good.
I whip out the plastic and swipe it till it’s warm to the touch, making sure everyone gets more than they asked for or even thought about getting – and stick all the stuff in my trunk, so as to be free of that other kind of seasonal spirit, Christmas Dread, which is fear of getting people dumb things or not enough things so they resent you on this most magical of days – or (worst case) you end up alone on this day of togetherness, which is said to be the worst thing that can happen all year. And which actually happened this year to someone close to me but far away geographically and she said that loving yourself, alone, on xmas eve was strangely liberating.
So I’m majorly grinching out, listening to these insufferable xmas carols about mercy mild, heavenly sleep and round yon virgin, I mean, I don’t even know what they’re talking about. And all I feel and see is the pressure to shove that plastic in deeper and deeper – and maybe that will release this ineffable “spirit!” It doesn’t.
But something really turns me around. A movie, “Elf.” Funny, how often movies are the source of new understanding, visions of personal growth, higher levels of being and living. It’s Will Farrell, an orphan who is accidentally abducted by Santa and raised as an elf at the North Pole, where every day is Christmas – and before long he has tears running down our cheeks, tears of compassion and hope, because Santa’s sleigh runs on Christmas Spirit and in cynical New York, there isn’t any. Except what naïve Will brings. He just doesn’t know any better than to love everyone! And without a credit card to do it!
We stand in line with hundreds of people at the Trinity labyrinth, chatting, shivering, amazed that so many have shown up for this Solstice Eve ritual of walking among the farolitos, glowing sweetly in their paper bags round the circle and everyone sidestepping and bumbling round the snakelike pattern to the center where we are alone for a moment and she gifts me with an amethyst ring with symbols of om and pregnant goddess with spiral belly, so full of good jujus – and in following days, amid the shopping, I find myself back in the labyrinth, alone, noticing its facility for emptying the mind and munching the ego by its sheer illogicality and wandering purposelessness.
Into my hands falls the new Beatles “Love” album, yes “new,” in that George Martin, their producer in those magical years of the sixties, took 36 of their songs and freely sampled, mixed, segued, overlaid and treated them all like movements or phrases in a symphony, creating a whole new, amazing jewel, one where, amongst the familiar, you don’t know what to expect and are taken down new passageways with old words.
I wander by Mike Drager’s shop and his annual yule party – you never know who you’ll find there – where hot toddies are repeatedly thrust in your hand and many a wild tale is told, like some pirate’s grogshop by the waterfront, and I end up discussing Norse mythology by the hour with Chet. Only in Ashland. I’ve researched on Wikipedia what amethyst is all about – and it means, literally, no-get-drunk. The ancients believed its powers would keep people sober. It doesn’t seem to be working. So, I realize, spirits are an enduring part of xmas spirit.
A favorite editor jokes: remember to keep the x in Xmas! I look up xmas on Wiki and it says the x was pronounced “ch” in Greek, so it actually is Christ and, as one dear friend reminds me, Xmas is not about religion, it’s about the core spirit of one divine sage (we are all divine sages, by the way), who spoke the obvious, (as revolutionary now as then) that it only works if we don’t return evil for evil and remember to love others as ourselves – but at an even deeper level to realize that if we don’t love our neighbor (or our neighboring religion), it means we don’t really love ourselves, so start there.
