Travels in Dreamland

Late spring in San Francisco, 1958, and it had been such a beautiful day! I remember this 9 year old physical body seated at a wooden desk in the back of a grammar school classroom, oblivious to the yammerings of some black-cowled nun at the front. Meanwhile, in my spirit form, I had slipped out through the open windows, expanding into the endlessness of blue, the timeless sky home of my child heart, the empty airy radiance of wordless boundless ecstasy.

Rudely drawing me back down from my happy flight, the bell that regulated time and activity at the school eventually sounded to close the day’s lessons and set the children free. As it noisily clanged, I realized once again that I was supposed to assume the form and behavior of this little person that people seemed to take me to be, and so I found myself walking with the other kids out the door and off into the sunny afternoon.

I recall that there was such a softness swirling of energies, a poignant gentleness of commingling shapes in motion, blurring colors and sounds — sound of many voices in one, whirled together in a sweet cacophony of children thrilled by life, still amazed by the appearance of anything as they raced off to wherever their feet and desire would lead them, and then suddenly I found myself at home.

I walked through the front door and then headed directly towards the back sunroom, where my grandmother was rocking my three-month old sister, Mary Rose. I was so taken with that little being I could almost burst with love — this exquisite angel in my dear grandmother’s lap — but when my grandmother looked up and saw me, she said quietly, so quietly I could barely hear: “She’s gone, Bobby. Our little Mary Rose is gone . . .”

The room was filling with a presence, and in retrospect it was not so much that the room was filling, but that everything else except this presence was falling away like filmy veils slipping off a statue, until there was only this luminous, potent presence of Love, and I suddenly burst into weeping — not at the loss, but at the magnificence of this Presence.

Then my grandmother did something that at first bewildered me, but later I understood. She took some water from a glass next to her chair to baptize my sister by her own hand “in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”. Then she leaned back, at peace, and shone the most loving, tender smile, a smile I will never forget, and whispered with utter assuredness, “She is with God now, Bobby.”

“Yes, I know.”I replied. I do not know how I knew, except that I understood from the same place in which I had been taken the previous summer, the place in which all the galaxies appear as small playthings in the unspeakable delight of Love, and so I said, “Yes…”

Later that day, one of the nuns from the Convent up the hill came calling at the house to speak with me. She asked if I knew where my little sister had gone, and I answered, “Yes, she is with God.”

Strangely, the nun insisted that, since Mary Rose had not been formally baptized in the Church, she was relegated to the place where “all the little un-baptized babies go”, to some kind of lesser “Limbo”, rather than directly to heaven with God.

I protested, “No, she was baptized, and besides that, things are not the way you say! God is everywhere, and everything is with God.”

At that moment, I decided that I would become a priest, and 4 years later entered the seminary, at the age of 13. I was going to clarify this matter, so that all could know the reality of the Divine Presence that out-shines death and man’s religion.

Ukiah, CA 1970

It was my last day off before I was scheduled to return to work at the residential treatment center and school for pre-teens where I had been working as a child-care counselor. I was tired but happy, and so I spent the day napping and puttering around my place out in the woods. Before I knew it, a gorgeous sunset was filling up the evening sky. The night was going to be lovely – a bit cool but clear and bright. The stars were already dotting the velvet infinity with their crystalline shine, and barely a breeze was stirring. As dusk approached, I sat down on my meditation cushion and, no sooner had I done so than it felt as if “I” had simply disappeared.

What remained was the evening, but it was like no evening I had ever known before. I had spent my fair share of dusks enraptured by the wonder and mystery of the oncoming night, and all the magic contained within its descending blanket of beauty and delight, but this night was somehow appearing in a different realm of cognition than that to which I had become accustomed.

The first thing that became apparent was the synchronicity of sounds. No longer experiencing myself as some kind of matrix of perception in the midst of things, what existed now was just awareness without anchor, encompassing all that arose and dissolved within it. There was an enormous, orchestrated symphony of sound, and it definitely followed a pattern in which everything perfectly participated in the most naturally timed fashion. The sounds of the night creatures rose and fell in utter harmony. The stars, the trees, the window, the room, the crickets, the music, the mood: all inextricably merged in a unified choir of mysterious expression!

I was not separate from any of this, to the point where even the thought of such would never occur to me (except here in retrospect). I had become utterly lost within the broad harmonic expanse of myself, even as the totality of this magnificent universal chant-song unfurled from out of nothing and dissolved there just the same. I am this nothing! Nothing is happening, and it sounds just fine!

Eventually, I realized I could see in the dark, and it seemed as natural as can be! I could see through all eyes, the tree eye, the cat eye, the wind eye, the star eye, the ground eye, the sky eye – Huuuuu!  I see! All of creation is only me, I am all of creation! I make this sound, I am that silence, singing, seeing, swirling in a dance of free surrender into the limitless majesty of my own symphonic being!

About 8 hours later, in chronological time, I was ‘nothing but a head, placed upon the ground’, as a gift for the morning light. The light itself revealed that all appearances themselves are like shadows, cartoon-like shape-shifting ephemerals which slide liquidly across the white screen of perception, and just as soon swim off into the vast unknown. There was a grand and benign humor to this which I cannot put into words – the literal “play” of consciousness — but there was also the realization that this transience of appearances included the perceiver too, and though it didn’t really matter, it now felt incumbent upon myself to solidify as form.

This metamorphosis took more effort than one might imagine! In fact, it required every bit of concentration I could bring to bear to retain contact with the life vehicle, but this turned out to be beyond my own efforts, and so I passed away . . . and No, I cannot explain how I returned, or even what returned, though it certainly wasn’t the same as what had begun this little voyage in what now seemed a lifetime ago. Still, it was nearing time for work, so I made some tea, showered and shaved, and off I went on my way.

“Let’s go surfin’ now!

Everybody’s learnin’ how!

Come on a safari with me!”

~The Beach Boys

Summertime in California, early 1960s . . . If you lived in San Francisco, down by the Pacific Ocean, you may not have known how to surf, but it was hard to resist the lure of the beach on warm summer days. At the corner of Ocean Beach, overlooked by the famed “Cliff House”, stretched a spit of sand called “Kelly’s Cove”. There, you might be treated to thrilling visions of surf riders daring the onrushing tides, or else washed off their gleaming boards in snarly curls of stampeding brine. In either case, the contagious excitement of taking it to the limit was just the kind of adolescent allurement that laced through many of the Top 40 tunes of the day. I was certainly not immune to the siren songs that promised fun and glory in the blue-green waves. “Everybody’s gone surfin’ . . . . surfin’ USA!”

I grew up in the Richmond District in San Francisco, adjacent to the emerald majesty of Golden Gate Park, about eight blocks up Fulton from Ocean Beach. First stop was at a Playland food concession (the eccentric amusement park across the street from the beach) for some tasty french fries to complement the salty ocean air. From there, I often shepherded my sister and two younger brothers over to the shore, down the steps of the concrete sea wall, and out to “our spot” near the pier (also now washed away). When it got hot enough, we’d swim out a bit and practice “body surfing”, unconcerned with the posted warning signs about dangerous undertows in the area. The internal chemical rush from catching the right wavelet only whetted my appetite for the real thing.

I eventually acquired my own training board, as well as an ill-fitting rubbery wet suit top. I ignored the odd glances from the other passengers when I boarded the bus on the way to the beach. I had just turned 13 in June, and it was my last summer vacation before I was to enter a Catholic Seminary in the Fall, down the Peninsula and away from the Ocean.

With Beach Boy lyrics romping in my ears, I fearlessly paddled out to the big waves, and hunched up from my prone position to a sitting one, dangling my shark-bait legs in the water and feeling like I had finally arrived at my goal.

After studying the methods of the various older guys – how they chose their own individual waves, got a good start, and then climbed their boards to merge their energy with the roll and surge of surf — I pumped up my courage and away I went! Within seconds, I found myself buried in the wave I had challenged, minus my board, coughing salty water and being swept swiftly, helplessly — not towards the shore — but out towards Hawaii.

After the turbulence had subsided and I had regained the surface, I began a desperate, futile effort to swim against the tide, and it was now quickly dawning on me why the warning signs about the undertow were placed near this beach. I had heard stories, but of course such things only happened to other people. At 13, I was invulnerable – summer had just started, for chrissakes! I had my whole life ahead of me!

As panic gripped me, I started to scream for help, but I was too far out by now to be heard, and as I tried to see the shore, I found, to my even greater panic, that the shore was no longer visible. The more I struggled, the wearier I became, and I began to realize that I could die! Yes! I could actually die out here, and, in fact, I probably would!

Then I recalled the previous summer, when I was tossed off my rubber tire while “tubing” a river in the Sierras. After being juggled wildly in the rapids’ froth, I found and desperately clung to a rock in the middle of the rapids. Eventually, my arms had grown too tired to hold it any longer in the force of the oncoming river. I just surrendered, and soon was washed into the still pool at the foot of the white water, breathing such a sigh of relief!

There was a lesson there, and it now raced back to me. I once again had found myself in a powerless condition, and so I stretched into a floating pose on my back, exhaled, and gave up the struggle. I let everything go. It all seemed so peaceful now, and timeless. I rested in the unknown of it all. Above me, the blue sky was beginning to blaze into the supernatural light of a glorious Western sunset. I had somehow become numb to the chilly embrace of the ocean on my skin. Gradually, an older, deeper remembrance began to flood my consciousness, obliterating any lingering traces of fear, or truly any concern at all.

I recall nothing after that, except a kind of dreamless slumber, and then the waking up at sea. I realized that I had been carried in a great arc, borne along by a Grace beyond comprehension. Finally, I was very gently deposited back to land in this lovely twilight, far down the beach from where I had embarked. After all that had transpired, I was simply famished for french fries. It was a long walk back to Playland and my bus stop, and as it turned out, the concession had closed by then. Still, it didn’t really matter. Just the hunger pangs alone — the exhilarating feeling of vibrant life and desire — were enough to make me smile out loud.

In 1980, while traveling up the Indonesian peninsula from Bali to Bangkok, I was fortunate enough to be guided by a friendly Balinese to a semi-secret ceremony being conducted by a local priest/shaman at the mouth of a bat cave, just up from the shore of the Indian Ocean.

It was a stormy day, but during the ceremony the skies cleared, and I found myself sitting near the bamboo platform of the white-clad priest, as he rang his bell and chanted musical verses. About 300 worshipers sat together before the enormous maw of a cliff cave, coated all around with several feet of black dried guano, or bat droppings.

From a National Geographic/cultural anthropological perspective, it was fascinating, for sure, but even their artfully produced travel films can hardly communicate the visceral sense of spirit presence at this event, and Bali of course is the Island of the Spirits.

Spirit was embodied, for the participants in this ritual, by the thousands of giant bats that inhabited the cave, and who reflected all the worship going on outside with a responsiveness that could only be gleaned by one in sympathetic reverie with them, and so for that time we all became bat hearts.

Amidst such a hypnotic vibration, I turned at one point to the priest as he turned simultaneously to me, and with a beautiful sweeping motion he lifted the bell and gave it a slight ding. That was enough to flood my being with tears I could not account for, so lost was I in this Balinese bat bliss of chant and invocation to the Mystery. At the climax of the fervent chanting, there was a sudden explosive wave of winging black beauty which emerged from the cave mouth, as an immense colony of bats swooped and glided in synch along the cliff wall to the left, and then just as gracefully returned to the cave.

At that point, everybody seemed to agree that it had been a good day for church, and gathered themselves up and wandered off somewhere, leaving me sitting in the sand, listening as the sea washed in and out, and contemplating the relativity of all religious beliefs, and what they all are rooted in — the same sense of awe and mystery that I had been plunged into that day.

I was 8 years old when first introduced to floral ecstasy. It was midsummer in San Francisco, and all of that summer was warm and bright, as I recall, but I’m sure we all like to remember the summers of our youth that way. Of course, it felt like it would just go on and on, and in a way it has.

I had already returned from my first 2-week Catholic Youth Summer Camp experience, and on the day of my family reunion, as I stepped off the bus crammed with Catholic campers, I slipped into an other-worldly faint that would end up changing my perspective on things quite a bit, though that’s for another story.

After that epiphany, I day-drifted through nearby Golden Gate Park, a magical forest of any boy’s dream, and sometimes ambled over to the Cabrillo Playground, two blocks down the hill from our Parish Church and Grammar School – St. Thomas the Apostle. Taking up about half of the long block from Fulton to Cabrillo, this playground was a favorite hang-out for the numerous Catholic baby boomers who swarmed around, bewildered by the various eccentricities and uninspected impulses of their current incarnation.

After my earlier experience, I was likely more bewildered than any of them. I might have been a body, but I sure didn’t know it. Rather, attention occasionally emerged in the middle of timelessness to permit some conventional activity. Something or other managed to somehow concretize itself for a moment, before dissolving in the no-mind state of aimless innocence again and leaving me to the will of That which moves in mysterious ways.

One of those moments came as I lay on the skirt of lawn that ran the length of the playground fence, which was itself bordered with a tall hanging hedge, redolent with the suddenly most intriguing pink blossoms. Their long, translucent tubular flutes extending from the flower’s mandala core beckoned one bumblebee after another to worship and partake of some secret nectar.

Spontaneously, I became aware of a luscious blossom, snatched off the bush, and pressed up to my face. It twirled seductively in the air before me by what turned out to be my own hand, and instinctively I bit the tiny tip of the flower’s flute and sucked in the most delicious nectar I had ever tasted!

This was revelation — I had fallen in love! As I drank in the flower’s essence, lost in the perfection, I understood something that I cannot, even now, put into words, nor do I now recall the name of those buds, but from that point forward, I became a floral devotee, all from that One Taste.

The first radio show I remember hearing was The Shadow, circa 1951. Because radio shows required visualization based on memory association, my 3 year old imagination was inspired to add some emotionally-reactive interpretation to the echoing sound of a creaking door opening, accompanied by a voice of barely-contained and mounting mania expounding the ominous conclusion that “Only The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

At about that point I lost interest in being scared witless and wandered off to contemplate this new experience of self-projected fearfulness in the comfort of the kitchen, where my Grandmother was baking something fragrant. The stress from the fear-poison in the body was felt as myself, so I must be the body. Being the body could include stressfulness, but the stress was also something I was adding to experience. That’s about as far as I was willing to go with the inquiry for the time being. I didn’t want to stay inside, in the shadows, since it was so sunny outdoors, and I was ready for some sky.

It took a few years until I felt up to confronting this fearfulness. I was about 6 or 7 years old, but somehow able to convince my parents to let me stay home alone while they went out for the afternoon with my siblings to do some shopping. I just felt like being alone, seeing what that was like.

I was watching some television show (we had just got our first TV), while the evening slowly crept up on me, like the San Francisco fog stealing in from the Bay, when it suddenly struck me that it was now pitch black night, and that I was in fact alone. My first reaction to this realization was to ease under the couch pillows with the remnants of my potato chip bag and wait it out. This seemed like the best strategy, until I heard a loud noise in the basement.

I tip-toed across the room, and then down that infinitely receding hallway to the door leading to the basement. I had never been in the basement by myself at night before – in fact, I don’t recall ever having been alone at night before that night, and certainly not with something potentially dangerous in the basement.

Now it seemed that I was compelled to open that door and investigate my fear, and it truly felt as if there was no option for me but to do just that. Moreover, something decided to up the ante, and have me go down the basement stairs without turning on the lights. I simply had to go right to the heart of the fear, descending into the pitch-black unknown, as a kind of test for myself – a test to see what would persist past my resistance, my fear.

I took one stair at a time, and with each step, the intensity of the foreboding grew, until it seemed as if I could go no further, so overwhelmed was I by the natural motive to fly right back up the stairs, slam the door, and scream my head off. But I didn’t. I just kept going, until I finally reached the cold damp floor of the basement, and realized I was shoeless.

Now things had become almost hallucinatory — I was in total darkness, shivering uncontrollably, and movement further into the palpable darkness of that basement seemed to take forever. With each step, a little more of my courage was sapped away, until I finally found myself standing in the heart of that bardo, pressed in on all sides by the excruciating weight of all fear itself, and yet, I was not being harmed, I was fine, I had stood in the midst of my mind’s own terror, and I was not obliterated.

The spasms of fear had wrung themselves out, and I was left just as I am. This was so interesting — I just stopped and felt myself as unassailable beingness itself. All the terror had simply been a projection of my own mind, and the recognition of this fact seemed incredibly liberating. I felt a luxuriant warmth spread throughout my body, and a simultaneous deep relief.

I am not sure how much time had actually passed while I stood there, but I was shaken out of my trance by the loud noise of the garage door suddenly being flung up, and the headlights of my Dad’s Buick beaming in at me, flooding the room with battery-powered radiance.

My father jumped out of the car and ran to me with an incredulous look on his face, asking me what I was doing in my bare feet at night down in the dark basement.

I looked up and said, “I heard a sound. . . .”

2002

Today serendipity provided an opportunity for me to grab my Gal and drop over the hills past Sausalito, climbing through the eucalyptus so fragrant and familiar, then wheeling down past Green Gulch Sanctuary to the power point known as Muir Beach. We swerve and snake down-mountain in dense mystic fog, but Maestro Wind is already calming itself in anticipation of another daylight miracle as we park and amble over the dunes to the rocky volcanic excess rising amiably southward, serenely watched over by Angels of Emptiness.

We like this kind of work, especially together. Always have. When possible, simple stupas are left as offerings to itself. Rock poems. It seems only right. Sometimes the poem continues on in our words, sometimes it was already written before we even get there. Lovers don’t care. They have enough to do without trying to figure it out at the same time. Their attention is devastated by tacit mutual recognition. Everything that appears, appears within them; they appear within each other as the unconditional gesture of Love to Itself. This they find endlessly amusing, and if they happen to be scribblers sometimes jot down a few notes on occasion.

A streak of blue on the horizon at noon signaled that the sky would soon be clearing, and as we poked through low lunar tidal pools we met up with winking anemone. Temporarily relieved by low tide of the blessing that submergence in the ocean bestows, they clung like vulva-shaped starfish to the slippery beached boulders, ribboned with slick seaweed flags scattered like mini jade mountains across the shore’s Dali carpet.

As we stood in typical awe, we realized that the gleaming peeled kiwifruit orifice at the center of each creature was its way of tasting the universe. At the center of the mandala of anemone convened on the Buddha-rock face before us, the largest of the group suddenly moistened to mirror back the full shot of sunlight now streaming down from a cloudless sky. The beam of transmission from that holy service blinded me with its brilliance. Looking down, iridescent peacock kelp quivered subtle blue electricities at the influx and exit of tidal whims, praising whole-bodily in kaleidoscopic weave and wave. Nothing needed to be said. The sound of Presence permeates every direction.

We stumble over to another rock and be seated. We are not alone. A large beetle is dragging itself towards us, one wing apparently broken. Now this beetle slowed as he crawled up to our feet. We could see a baby-pink lining under his dislocated carapace, pulsing in the sunlight. Suddenly, and we all are mysteriously familiar with this ancient moment, the beetle began to flutter its wings in a blur of pink ecstasy. Gradually floating up to eye level with us, it paused, shifted gears, and sped off towards the ocean and out of sight.

You turned, looked at me with that increasingly familiar expression, and said: “Of course, while you were dreaming up love verses, I was writing a beetle poem.”

“There ya go!” I replied.

It is dusty and kiln-dried, mid-way along the crooked spine of the Atlas Mountain Range. Humps of browned and barren hills spread stuporous in relentless heat. Not a breeze is stirring. It’s 1979, and I have been trekking through Northern Africa for several weeks now.

In the middle of the road I’ve wandered down, seven young Berber boys stand in my way, their beseeching hands reaching out to me, their eyes imploring me for something, anything.

Above them, lifted on the thermal currents, large black carrion birds lazily circle over the baking yurts these children’s families call home.

They are nomads like myself, roaming through this arid land, with their shaggy goats and worn blankets, and now their hopeful eyes impale me.

I can almost see behind those eyes, and what I see caves in my heart.

What is seen is the one who sees, and the one who sees is the one I am. This is why I start to weep, and why it feels as if I’ll never stop.

They watch me, they weep with me, the hills are weeping, and yet – it is so quiet, so very still.

Not a noise is heard, except for the sound my tears make as they splash the hard clay at my feet – the earth that I am – and are swallowed up in the mystery I’ve emerged from, the very place my path is leading me, even now.

There are some mangy little mutt dogs by the roadside, their tongues drooping from listless jaws, panting, panting, and the flies . . .

The omnipresent flies are thick amidst wafting aromas of cracked wheat from the threshing circle in the near distance where a woman and her donkey crush grain, just as they have always done. They circle round and round, as if on an eternal wheel, the wheel of life . . .

There is something . . . familiar in all of this.

Somehow, within that circle, I sense that all I will ever need to understand is just about to reveal itself.

After some time, I realize that it hasn’t, that it never will, and so I move on.

There is nothing to understand.

Just live.

The biblical character Jesus was reported to have said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Thus, he immediately refuted the notion of a separate God.

Now, given the way things go on this lovely rock, a number of folks came along later, professing nominal resonance with Jesus Christ — even calling themselves “Christians” — who nevertheless persisted in clinging to the infantile model of a parent deity.

Such attitudes are not unusual in this realm, even today. Folks across the spectrum often behave like emotional infants in their relationship to life, regardless of their chronological age. Conversely, in some fundamentalist theistic religions, claiming the thrilling recognition “I am God” has gotten people put to death . . . yikes!

I remember trying to find a place to sleep in some town between Bali and Yogyakarta in Indonesia one night in the summer of ’81, and apparently my efforts coincided with a Muslim Holy Time. Thousands of very excited people were running through the streets with torches, screaming out some kind of repetitive slogan.

I inquired of my guide about the meaning, and he said, “They’re shouting ‘There is only God!’” The ecstatic enthusiasm they exhibited for such a pertinent and succinct observation seemed quite remarkable to me, as did the hostel we finally settled at, having been assured by the guide that it was “the last vacancy left in town”, but that’s another story.

At any rate, he noted that westerners should be indoors during this time,since it would be dangerous for them to be seen.

“Why” I asked, “if there is only God?”

He replied, “It’s not the same God.”

It was about 10 PM, and I was commuting from Boston to New York in late September of 1984. It had been a bumpy year, so to speak, and I was on the brink of a rather complex career turning point.

Earlier that afternoon, I had just retrieved my car from a Boston body shop after an unenviable encounter with a runaway bus in Cuban Harlem. This had been my second visit to that particular sheet metal doctor, who was kind enough to remind me, as I drove away, that “the third time is the charm”.

In retrospect, I must admit that these little clichés, floating around in the vast collective consciousness, have an odd way of validating themselves.

I was overly familiar with the stretch of highway that I was currently navigating, and mind had slipped into semi-automatic, entertaining the random road musings about God and mortgage payments, love and marriage, pasts and futures vying for attention, even as the breathless present was rushing to itself with arms wildly waving.

Glancing up, I noticed that I was approaching my designated exit along the Saw Mill Parkway. It had come up sooner than expected, punctuating my reveries. I checked the rear view mirror to see if I could move into the right lane to exit, and saw a pair of headlights in what seemed a good bit of distance behind me in the right lane. I felt comfortable about the lane switch, but as I began to cross over, I was rear-ended by the oncoming car, which had been moving at much faster speed than I had calculated. I was pushed into the guardrail to the right, then lost control and swerved through the rail on the left, plunging over the side of the mountain.

As I plummeted down the hillside, my visibility was thwarted by the darkness and the strobe-like streaks from my headlight beams as they bounced wildly off the onrushing landscape. The mind knew with complete certainty that “this was it.” Not only was I about to die, but it was actually going to be really gruesome, with mangled crispy body parts and all the attendant horrors now swarming back from the 60’s cautionary “Drivers Ed” films we had to sit through back in high school. An enormous fear raced through me on the wings of adrenaline – the primal survival response crushing up against sure knowledge of sheer ruin.

Suddenly I hit the bottom of the hill, but unlike the movie finale, I did not explode in a blazing fireball. Rather, my car catapulted up through the air, flipping over and over as it crossed the oncoming 2-lane highway. It continued air-borne across the service road, finally slamming into the side of the hill on the other side, where it proceeded to roll down a bit until it hung, teetering, on the edge of an embankment.

It must have been while I was in mid-air (although my recollected sense was that time itself had truly stopped) that the fear was swallowed up by a great silence. I had somehow been lifted out of the accident and into an infinite dark. This ebony silence was deeper than I had ever known and certainly beyond my feeble adjectives, and yet curiously “familiar”, as if it had always been here, just behind the chitchat of everyday mind and presumed identity.

Spontaneously, there was a direct “knowing” that there was no death, but more to the point – it was self-evidently obvious that there had never been, nor could there ever be, the person I had taken myself to be. All that had been like a brief restless dream, an imaginary figment. There was no car, no accident, no trace of any reference point. There was no narrative or story line of “my life”, any life, any world, any past or future. There was nothing to remember, nothing to forget, nothing to hope for, nothing to fear. In fact the whole history of human experience was revealed as a non-event, or what I came to call a virtual reality. When one is identified with it, it all appears totally real, time and space seem real, other people seem real, places and events seem real, but once outside the illusion, it all dissolves as if it never was.

What became implicitly obvious was that nothing had ever happened, in the same sense that one awakens from a dream at night, and all the characters and events from the dream dissolve. The accompanying sense was not of some existential angst, but on the contrary, immense joy and gratitude, and then “behind” that, just this impersonal knowing quality that remains ever untouched, just a pure awareness without any object or emotion or anything perceivable or conceivable, except the recognition of its own sufficiency (to use words where all verbal language fails).

Alone, yet with no sense of lack or feeling of incompleteness — nothing to be desired or avoided, accepted or rejected. A self-illuminating Awareness — boundless and inexpressible, vastness with no center, motionless, serenity with no opposite, and thus not even serenity – such words and phrases don’t even touch it — and it went on forever, yet without even any sense of time. The timeless limitless Void, but not with any quality of lack or vacantness one might associate with that concept. In fact, there are no associations or qualities that could be applied, while immersed in that suchness. It defies any attempt to frame it, since it is without reference to frame, and so I will cease my efforts in that regard. If one has had that experience, no words are necessary. If not, no words are sufficient.

Suddenly “I” (or rather, the matrix of attention, for lack of a more precise terminology ) was back in the crushed driver’s seat. The left foot had pierced through the floor board of the car, and was dangling shoeless in the air over the embankment, shattered. People were milling about, sharing their disbelief that someone could have survived such a disaster! I was barely aware of them, just in shock from having entered into time and form once more – what a strange and bizarre experience: body, mind, self-sense! The only comparable events had happened to me early in life, at the ages of two and then again at 8, but nothing as dramatic as this.

I was engulfed in tears, but these tears had nothing to do with the accident, or survival, or relief to be essentially in one piece. I hardly cared about any of that at this point, like last night’s dream. These tears were tears of gratitude, and yet I didn’t even know what I was grateful for – just an endless gratitude for what I had been shown, but also tinged with a bit of grief at having been shrunk back down to this dense and heavy human level.

An interesting postscript to that event was brought to my attention later by friends. Several reported intense experiences of  Presence timed to that very night. Another, who was sitting hospital vigil with her husband in the final stages of his terminal illness, reported that — at around 10 PM that night — she was overwhelmed by a brilliant streak of light which shone through her heart and into and around her husband for several minutes. By the next day he had recovered completely from his illness, much to the bewilderment of the medical staff. I have no way of verifying any of this, but it seemed sincere when it was all related to me.

After the incident, however, I found that my interest in spirituality and spiritual groups in general had fundamentally dissolved. I went through the motions for several months, but had a hard time raising any enthusiasm for that game any longer. All of the various practices, doctrines, beliefs, and claims of the human spiritual and philosophical systems that I had encountered and even participated in over the previous years now seemed rather superfluous, and even naïve.

Moreover, it seemed as if I had even fallen into a semi-amnesia about the experience itself. Coming back into the body was such a step down in awareness that I felt as if I had gone through a lobotomy just to be human again. It also felt that, in the midst of the timeless state, I had received a kind of download of “recognitions”, but it would take many years to even start to process the import and implications of all that.

Among those realizations was the sense that there seemed to be two truths, or perceived realities – the world of the absolute, in which nothing happens, and the world of the relative, where there is a you and me and everything. (Much later, I came to realize that too was an incomplete understanding, and that in reality there are no separate realms of the absolute and relative. That is merely another idea of mind to which one might attach.)

Thus began a long period in my life (about 15 years) where I became totally immersed in the “ordinary” world (although I did continue Zen meditation), focusing on career, spending time traveling around the globe, just soaking up other cultures and exploring the human experience in all its variety, enjoying all that incarnated life had to offer. I bought and sold homes, became a big success in my career, stocked a wine cellar, and unreservedly threw myself into the phenomenal world. It was play, like pretending to be the character in a virtual reality game, but knowing clearly that this fictional creation was not my real identity.

Nevertheless, I noticed that I would be drawn into that Void “state” of impersonal awake awareness in meditation, and although it was strange at first coming back into normal waking consciousness, I eventually began to adapt to the transition. As time went on, I found that I could almost merge the two states in the midst of everyday life. As long as I didn’t fixate on any particular issue, I was able to keep a non-dwelling consciousness, and in the midst of that, the open empty spaciousness of the Void “state” would rise to the forefront. Otherwise, it remained in the background, but informing all that appeared in consciousness. Everything became transparent, anything could be manifested, and yet nothing made any difference. It was like an absorbing movie that would be utterly forgotten the next day.

This provided a particular perspective on events, experiences, and relationships with the so-called ‘world”. I could recognize how it was all arising from thought-energy, and thus was a constant creation, held together by the power of that thought-energy. It was not a fixed or stable thing at all, but in each “moment”, became a whole new creation, as the thought-energy morphed kaleidoscopically. There was in fact no solid material world, just a subjective creation endlessly modifying itself, and yet although I could see the function, I still had not touched on the Basis for it, the motive that compelled and informed the universal unfolding.

That period came to an end with a big bang when I was out for a walk one day during a lunch break, and out of nowhere was suddenly knocked down to my knees and pierced at the heart by an arrow of Love. This was to be the beginning of an immense heart opening that paved the way for meeting my Beloved again for the first time in this life. That’s when things got really interesting, I was given the Pearl beyond price, and the Poetry came alive!

In late 1973, after training for several years at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California, I moved briefly back to San Francisco. One day I heard that a great Indian Yogi, reputedly capable of transmitting enlightenment with a look or touch of initiation (called Shaktipat), was visiting the Bay Area, so I decided to investigate.  I was curious, and invited an open-minded friend along for the experience.

I had no idea what to expect when I wandered into the Ashram in Berkeley that day. Momentarily, we found ourselves separated – men on the right side and women on the left – in the middle of a cavernous room filled with sweet incense and about 500 enthusiasts who were being led in some wildly ecstatic Hindu chant by a dark-complexioned Swami in sunglasses, eerily suggesting Ray Charles in orange drag.

His name was Muktananda, which translated means “the bliss of liberation”, and he was clearly grooving — swaying and rocking on his throne to the mounting mantric choruses alternating back and forth between the male and female sides of the hall.  It was all rather giddy and infectious — nothing like the somberness of the Zen chants I was accustomed to – and I must say, these folks were lifting off!

At a certain point, devotees began lining up and approaching the Swami’s dais to offer little gifts of fruit and flowers, and he responded by dusting them with a large peacock feather. The effect on the recipients seemed to occasionally result in spontaneous displays of physical and emotional catharsis, and for a moment I had the weird sensation of being at a Hindu version of some Christian fundamentalist revival meeting!

Still, I had a cultural anthropological responsibility, so I eventually merged into the communion line that now slowly snaked up to the Swami. Fieldwork sometimes offers one the opportunity to sample the intrinsic dynamic of a wide range of sub-cultural group phenomena, particularly in Berkeley, CA in the early 70’s.

At any rate, when I finally came face to face with the fellow, he started to wave the feather towards me but suddenly paused, raised his sunglasses over his eyebrows with his free hand, and peered intently into my eyes. After a moment, he leaned closer and whispered:

“Om Namah Shivaya!”  

“Om Namah Shivaya!” I agreed, though I didn’t know you were supposed to bring a fruit or something, but no matter. As soon as I had answered, he began swatting me repeatedly with his flexible peacock wand. At a certain point I sneezed, he laughed, and this seemed like the right time to bow and move on.

Back at my seat, I detected no signs of any incipient religious fit, though several fellow pilgrims in my immediate vicinity appeared quite moved by various eccentric energies modifying their electrical circuitry.

After everyone had a chance to make their pilgrimage, the Swami got up and left the room. Things cooled down really fast — a lot of blissful sighs and announcements about upcoming productions — and I found my friend near the entrance door where we walked out into the bright sunshine.

“How was that?” I asked her.

“I liked the singing!” she replied.

Then she said: “I saw you up there. What was that all about?”

“Don’t know!” I replied, but over the next few months, I found the mantra spontaneously repeating itself, and so I went with that, and it was interesting, especially as I wandered off across the continent shortly thereafter, taking my time with a tent and brown rice cooker, and meeting up with all sorts of fascinating folks along the way.

Then one morning in Richmond, Kentucky, I was doing my usual morning sitting when the mantra came up in a very absorbing fashion, accompanied by an overwhelming permeation of the most intoxicating bliss, even to the very palpable sense of physical elevation off the floor. As it happened, this seemed so hilarious to me that I just burst out laughing!

The episode signaled the conclusion of that particular yogic adventure. I’d seen directly how seductive such experiences could be, and how easy it would be to attach to them, getting trapped along the way in a perpetual intermediate zone of seeking for more and bigger experiences. I’d come to recognize through observation that experience itself merely constitutes a modification of consciousness, no matter how profound or ecstatic it might seem at the moment. My intent, however, was to see through and penetrate the facade of consciousness itself, and I realized instinctively that to pursue experience for its own sake would represent a huge detour on the path.

This is certainly not to deny the legitimacy or efficacy of mantric practice for those so inclined, since it can certainly serve a valuable function in terms of developing focus and concentration, and even acting as a psychic shield to guard one from unwholesome influence and so forth. There are, after all, innumerable gates – one for each of us — and each a doorway to ourselves.

In the summer of 1969, Mike Magee and I embarked upon a fishing trip for steelhead — the great ocean-going trout — deep into the Trinity Alps of Northern California. This was to be a transformative trip for many reasons, but one incident particularly stands out in memory:

We had arrived at our chosen evening camp spot just as the sky was beginning to cloud up, and it appeared that some rain was imminent. We tried our luck at the river (Trinity River), fishing for our dinner, but had to settle on a back-up meal of canned Dinty Moore Beef Stew before it got too dark. We had built a small campfire just before the first rains began to softly fall around us, and as we gazed into the warming flames we both fell uncharacteristically quiet, and the hush seemed to gather power, a power that transcended the usual campfire reveries, and indeed it seemed as if we had somehow been lured by this “place” out of time and into a realm beyond our reckoning.

 Directly above us, a full moon shone down brightly, as if through a portal in the dark and raining night skies. All around the perimeter of the campfire, the steady rain poured down, but within our small fire circle we were somehow kept dry.

 As the night progressed, the situation did not alter — rain surrounded us, but not a drop came into the circle, though we were out in the open, unsheltered by any tree or rock ledge. Moreover, the blaze of the fire continued on, hour after hour, with no discernible change in intensity, although we added no wood besides what we had originally used to build the fire. It maintained itself without us adding any additional fuel, and the night deepened, yet we said not a word.

 The silence of that night was so deep, deeper than any night I had ever encountered. Actually, it seemed as if time itself had literally stopped, and suddenly we were looking at each other in astonishment as the light of day began to dawn, and we realized that we had sat there without moving for over 9 hours, nor had the flame altered in any way, but now that the morning had arrived, the rain began washing over us, telling us it was time to pack up and move along.

In a kind of daze we gathered our gear into the car trunk of my 1960 Ford Falcon and set out back on the road — both of us too confounded to say a word. After about 5 minutes on the road, we passed an incredible scene — a house was burning out of control, and an Indian family was standing mutely off to the side, watching their home burn fiercely in the rain. It was such a stunning image that we just kept driving on for a mile or so in a numbed daze until we sort of snapped back to attention and turned the car around to go back and see if we could help.

We spent the next hour driving back and forth, unable to locate either the burning house,  or the spot where we thought we had camped. Neither “place” seemed to exist at all! Believe me, we covered and re-covered every inch of road, again and again, and yet were flabbergasted that we could now not find any trace of the Indians, nor of the pull-off where we had spent the night.

 At last, we gave up, and headed off to more strange and unusual adventures, following the steelhead as they themselves followed the spawning salmon up-river and into the Mystery.

Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery, 1971- 73

In the Sanzen Room, where Rinzai Zen Masters conduct formal interviews with their students, they require the aspirant to present their understanding with their whole being. Mere verbal play is rewarded with a quick dismissal, if lucky, or even a quick blow. At Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery, my first few months’ answers to the initial koan (a kind of question used to test of one’s insight into reality) I was given were gently laughed off, and often I was dismissed before I could even open my mouth.

After exhausting every conceivable approach, I was left with an interior devastation that I could not have imagined. Somehow, the inquiry proceeded regardless, on a level I had never known, nor can even now describe. More months followed, and I became very quiet, absorbed in an internal process deeper than thought.

The shell of the self-construct, or what some call the personal story, suddenly cracked open early one morning during Kinhin (15 minute walking meditation interspersed between hour-long sitting sessions). It was during a sesshin (a week-long intense meditation interrupted by 4 visits a day with the Master) . As I walked in the slow procession, shivering in the predawn icy mountain chill, my heart suddenly welled up into my throat, and then something exploded there, and I was overtaken with convulsive sobs, so much so that I had to be led to the side to recover.

All that I had cherished about any sense of self was obliterated in an instant — as if it had never existed in the first place — and I stood alone in the universe, which was nothing but my own immense body, within which an unspeakable silent perfection manifested as the immaculate nature of awareness-being itself. These are only words for something that words cannot truly touch.

For the next several hours, all I could do was weep with a relief that, again, cannot be described. When it was my turn to go before Roshi, I was still weeping. He took one look at me, skipped the usual demand for an answer to my koan, and smilingly broke into English with, “Ahhh, crying Buddha!”

I don’t have much memory of the weeks that followed (it felt as if I was in a serene floating world, not even in a body), but about a month later, in Sanzen, when he finally asked for an answer to my koan, I spontaneously shot my arm up and shouted a monosyllabic reply that surprised both of us.

He grinned and said, “So, the flower has finally begun to open!”

Now I was ready to begin in earnest . . . .

About a year later, I had reached a point in my practice in which even the overlay of “zen” on whatever this IS had simply become so excruciating that I walked out of my cabin in the middle of the night, dressed in my thin cotton robe in freezing weather, and not even giving a damn where I was off to.

About an hour later I found myself way up the side of the mountain, well above the small monastery nestled below, but now vaguely heard the faint but growing sound of the monks and students beginning the morning sutra chants, and this infuriated me! I rolled around on the ground, threw rocks in the air, smashed logs into trees, and finally just sat down, numb.

The chanting continued. I began to weep, not because of what the sutras were proclaiming, and not even because of the dearness of the fools down there going on in that strange fusion of one syllable Sanskrit and Japanese that constitutes the traditional zen chants, but just because …. Just because of what? Who knows? I just wept.

Somehow, in the midst of those tears, it suddenly struck me how sweet the mountain air was, how fresh the morning breeze, how dazzling the dawning blue sky! I relaxed and just let go. All my cares dropped away like tattered old robes. I felt utterly clear, reborn, in love, but I didn’t know with whom, nor did it matter.

Hours passed. I had stopped weeping and just sat there on a rock, at peace, with a huge grin on my face. I missed the morning Sanzen (interview with the master). Roshi sent someone out to look for me. Somehow, I knew this, I “experienced” Roshi beckoning me, so what the hell, who cares, I walked back down the mountain and eventually found myself kneeling in front of him in his room. He sat facing me, studying my face, it seemed, and assessing my state. For the first time, I had no interest in his remarks. Who cares? He’s a bald-headed little man with poor English. I said nothing. He looked at me, I looked at him. There was nothing happening. There had never been anything happening, except this ridiculous game of persona, and frankly, I couldn’t raise an idiot’s thought about any of it.

Contrary to the pop-psych cliché, this was not a form of disassociation, although there were certainly aspects of it that would seem so. There was no preference, no sense of polarities, not even any movement in mind — just the immediacy of the moment, of free bare attention itself — just this clear transparency of now. All my previous quandary and frustration had long vanished, and I felt no relation to the person who had earlier stormed up the side of the mountain in the middle of the night. There was simply this, without any superimposition. It wasn’t zen, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of a thousand names we use to attempt the impossible – describing “this”. Nevertheless, it is no different than what is right now — these fingers typing away, your eyes glancing over the little dots and dashes, earth spinning around the sun, the galaxies turning in vastness, the same vastness that moves these fingers, your eye muscles, our heart.

Roshi finally made a kind of grunt, nodded to me, and I got up and walked out of his room and into myself, and what that is I still can’t say with any words of men or gods, but it’s certainly not a problem to be solved nor a riddle to be figured out, and that’s fine with me.

In 1970, I was fulfilling my Alternate Service obligation to the Government by working as a Child Care Counselor at a residential treatment center for pre-teens in Ukiah, CA. During that time, I was renting a small cabin about 5 miles outside of town for my days off. It was situated near a vineyard that backed into rolling hills, and the nearest neighbors were about a mile away. I had inherited it from another counselor who had burned out emotionally after two years at the center, and had returned to his home in the mid-west somewhere to recuperate.

Along with the cabin I had unwittingly gained a small, non-descript cat who wandered around the premises spreading cat hairs. Chronically allergic to cats, I tried to avoid this character, but he was apparently oblivious to my health issues and persisted in his shedding. Eventually, I felt that I needed to take more decisive action. As he was nonchalantly lounging on a widow sill one sunny morning, I scooped him up and carried him out to my car. Discerning my intent he offered a mild protest, but my resolve was firm, and I would not be dissuaded from my chosen course.

I drove four or five miles up into the hills to release the little fellow into the next phase of his earthly destiny, reasoning that he was semi-wild and independent anyway, and would likely adapt without much effort to his new environment. The hills were stocked with abundant rodent life, and he had already demonstrated his skills in that regard by occasionally depositing mice cadavers at the cabin’s front door. Without much ado I bid him good luck and happy hunting and then drove off, forgetting that things are not always what they seem to be.

The cabin itself possessed an odd quality, as if it was simultaneously appearing in this as well as some other, invisible realm. Not only the cabin, but the surrounding hills themselves seemed to evoke a subtle mix of mysterious intuitions at a subconscious level that I had difficulty accessing. Initially I ignored these whispers, speculating that perhaps they were just the lingering vibrations from an ancient Indian encampment in the area. I had recently begun practicing Zen meditation, and attributed these perceptions to the mere play of mind. Sometimes we can be rather naïve in our assumptions. One day I was to find out just how much.

It was a beautiful early afternoon in Autumn. Northern Californians called this time Indian Summer and, although I never knew the derivation, it seemed like an appropriate designation for this lovely season. I felt like a hike into the hills behind the cabin that day, and started off along a deer path that wound lazily up through the oaks and manzanita shrubs that thrived on the hillsides above the vineyard. Curiously, as I passed by certain random trees I felt a strange sense of apprehension just below the surface of awareness. It felt as if they were somehow conscious players in a spell that was being woven around me!

I had spent a good deal of time in the woods, and in fact had lived as a hermit for six months in the Sierras during the previous year, but I had never felt anything like this before. As I proceeded further into the hills, I began to sense an ambiguity about my orientation and, to my growing dismay, eventually realized that I was lost. I had been wandering around in circles for over an hour, and had no idea now how to continue. I found a rock outcropping to sit and ponder the situation, but as I took my seat I noticed a group of large buzzards directly overhead and was instantly aware that they were keen on some sort of rapidly approaching death.

My hair literally stood on end as a series of violent shivers churned through me, and without further thought I jumped up and began to run! It didn’t matter where – I just had to move, and I let my body take me on whatever course it would. Time played havoc in my mounting panic, and it was nearly dark when I finally – gratefully – reached my cabin, slammed the door behind me, and exhaled. Whatever that was, I believed that I had left it behind in the hills.

I was mistaken. A deafening series of clashing cymbal-like sounds, accompanied by blinding lights and shrieking howls, started encircling the cabin – slowly and methodically at first, but soon accelerating into a dizzying rush that threatened to sweep the cabin itself into a tornado whirlwind and whisk it from its foundations into the open maw of chaos and catastrophe!  The walls began to vibrate fiercely, and then something told me: “Here it comes!”

Suddenly it was dead quiet. Too quiet. I now realized to my mounting horror that I was no longer alone in the cabin. Some kind of dark and menacing force was materializing in the corner across from me. A pitch-black shadow was growing before my startled eyes, blotting out the faint light from the window and creeping across the ceiling, walls, and floor towards me. I stood paralyzed in fear as my eyes darted helplessly in search of some escape. Suddenly spotting an opening, I raced towards the hallway leading to my bedroom before it too was swallowed up in the oncoming shadow. Slamming the door, I dove like a child under the bed and waited there, shivering uncontrollably.

Suddenly sensing movement to my side, I inadvertently banged my head on a bed board in startled shock before realizing that the creature next to me was the cat! The cat! Somehow, over the course of several weeks since I had dropped him off in the hills, he had managed to find his way back to the cabin, slip in through an open window, and was now calmly stretching and yawning next to me! I was incredulous – so much so that I had even momentarily forgotten the terror that was now pressing ominously against my bedroom door.

With feline grace the cat then stood up and padded in a most regal and dignified manner to the edge of the door that stood between us and the relentless psychic pressure being applied from the other side. Pausing there, he then tilted his head back and let out the most piercing cat screech I had ever heard! The echo of his shout seemed to reverberate through the whole valley, and then there was complete silence. I listened for any sign of the horror that had invaded the house, but heard nothing. Crawling out from under the bed, I proceeded carefully to the door and, opening it gingerly, found no evidence of anything amiss. The cat scampered into the living room and pounced up onto the couch and resumed his relaxed pose, as if nothing extraordinary had just transpired.

After looking around to inspect the place, I peeled off my urine-soaked pants and headed into the bathroom for a long shower. When I had dried myself off, I went to the kitchen cabinet and found some herbal tea. I brewed a cup and then joined the cat on the couch. He climbed into my lap, meowed, and together we kept vigil until dawn.

As the brilliant morning sun streamed through the windows, I was engulfed in a mood of deep peace. Outside, a family of deer was grazing near the window, and the valley was filling with gorgeous birdsong. 

Since that night, I have never been troubled by allergies to cats, although I do pay more attention to where I am going when walking in the woods.

Returning south to San Francisco after a 6-month stint as a grateful hermit in the Sierras in 1970, my heart tugged me over to the Pacific coastline, where I eventually found myself leisurely touring along the supernaturally splendid Coastal Highway 1.

By the time I had reached the mouth of the Russian River it was late afternoon, and although the shoreline was rather socked in by a coastal fog, I decided to attempt a climb down the steep cliffs leading to the beach.

What moved me to challenge the elemental fates on that day I cannot recall, but the time-tested refrain, “It seemed like a good idea at the time…” could probably be inserted here.

I was about halfway down the side of the cliff wall when I realized I was in a bit of a predicament. I could proceed no further in my descent, since there was no apparent footing. However, I had managed to reach a point that made any ascending retreat equally unviable.

As I grimly pondered the situation, I was suddenly startled: a madly barking, drool-slathered German Shepherd (dog) at the foot of the cliff below was focusing an unaccountable rage in my direction. We were the only two creatures on the foggy beach that day, it was getting dark, and a chill damp wind was now sweeping fiercely up the cliff face.

I was losing my footing on the rock indentation where I had temporarily perched. It was starting to crumble and I had to pee — real bad. The wind began to amp into a shriek. The insane dog’s barking blended with the voice of the wind, becoming even more hostile and incessant. My heart felt like it was going to join my bladder in some volcanic activity. Time seemed frozen, and the experience now seemed to loom as a defining moment for me.

Many have experienced this at some point in life – the psycho-physiological matrix of fear that cannot be casually swept aside by the comforting little lies we tell ourselves. All the little internal chattering narrative that we perpetually indulge runs smack into the unavoidable maw of clear and present breathless reality. First come the impotent curses, then the cold sweat panic, then the hallucinatory spree of mind in overwhelm, and then…

For a brief eternal instant the setting sun on the Pacific horizon peeked out below the cloud cover, and quickly spread its gorgeous illumination along the underbelly of the now transfigured blanket, and what a sight it was – the most riotously effulgent sunset I had ever seen!

Tears poured involuntarily down my cheeks – the imminent danger completely forgotten in the glory of the scene.

Just then a seagull, white, with ribbons of gray tapering down its wingspan, soared in a kind of lazy slow motion directly into my line of sight, and the wonder of its gliding aero-dynamism simply stopped my mind!

It was as if I had never really seen this before or, to be more precise – it was as if I was seeing it for the very first time once again – as I had when I was baby, with no words to limit it, no concepts to bind it to the mind’s dusty library of accumulated associations.

I Was this Wonder! All of it was me – free and utterly perfect just as it is – no past or future or any sense of time at all – just This! Here! Now!

My heart fell to peace. In this way, the world came to peace, to rest. And now I noticed my body almost floating down the side of the cliff. There was no calculation involved at all in the descent. I am sure, if you were an observer, you would have seen, in the dusky twilight, a rather remarkable feat of rock climbing!

When I alighted on the beach, the now-transformed dog came and snuggled its body against mine — we knew — and together we ambled off along the sand into the darkness, empty and full, two children of the Majesty.

I must have read some bit of Eastern philosophy about needing to go beyond the mind in order to discover the natural state of true freedom. In any case, I began pondering that concept, until one night, sitting out on the front porch of my parent’s house, I found myself utterly absorbed in the inquiry, forgetting all else. No matter how deep I seemed to go, however, I would still keep coming up against an impenetrable wall that prevented me from going any further.

I was just coming to the recognition that mind cannot be used to transcend mind, when a family member called out for me. It felt like they were miles away, but the voice was insistent, and finally I came around. They said, “You better come and see this on the TV — Bobby Kennedy has just been shot!”

With that, my inquiry into the nature of mind got momentarily put on the back-burner, but it would not be long before such an investigation coincided with my commitment to social service.

Growing up in San Francisco, with a fervent social worker activist for a mother, and a live-in grandmother who had been instrumental in founding the Women’s Benefit Association (an early pre-cursor of the modern Women’s Movement dating back to the ’30s), I was naturally inclined to a service orientation. With my own 7 years in a Catholic Seminary during the turbulent 1960’s, timed with the Second Vatican Council, when fresh voices within the church were speaking the Liberation Theology, I was moved to explore a fresh connotation to the service ideal that related directly to the oppressed and needy.

All around me swirled an immense energy of change, of consciousness re-inventing itself, wild, often conflicted, and vividly alive. For most, this all amounted to some kind of problem in need of a political solution, and plenty were suggested. I was more interested in the source of the dilemma, rather than the mere symptoms. I had learned early on that any particular social manifestation was the play of dependent origination, a constituent component of a greater whole, and that’s the vision that beckoned me – the unified principle, the basis.

For a long time – ever since a dramatic experience at the age of 8 rocked my young mind – it seemed like everybody was performing. All were busy pretending to be students, protesters, cops, teacher/preachers, soldiers, radicals, politicians, talking TV heads, holy swamis, rabbis too, humans doing what they do, but the closer I looked, I could not find any enduring reality in this earnest charade. It was all a bit ridiculous, in fact, but what was I?

Was I the one who sent my draft deferment back to the draft board, naively accompanied by a love poem? Was I the one who, consequently, stood in front of that same board one evening, on the verge of being shipped off to Viet Nam, inquiring together on the real meaning of serving one’s country? Was I the person classified then as a conscientious objector? Was I in fact any of the characters who subsequently went on to pursue the right action, the right service, in whatever way the dream moved, weaved, twisted and turned, or none of them, none of that at all? I didn’t know, I wanted to find out, and so I delved deeper and deeper into the inquiry. The quest was not just for my own satisfaction, but I realized that, unless I was able to come to terms with what’s real, I could never hope to be of any true service, but merely compound delusion with more delusion.

Rather than providing me with answers and solutions, however, that inquiry methodically stripped away the pretense of knowledge itself, drilling down through the stratified layers of borrowed notions, subtle programs, and second-hand beliefs to the core story of “me” and “mine”. There is a pain that burns, when everything we once may have cherished is revealed to be illusion. I had to come to terms with that, to live unafraid in the unknown, to love, unafraid, in the unknown, regardless of current circumstances and conditions breezing across the dream screen. What’s eventually discovered, if we follow all the way through, is that Awareness alone remains, empty even of any emptiness — both the origin and destination of the whole functioning totality of universal manifestation. Such a realization was still far beyond my ken, and the fullness of its recognition and consequent embodiment certainly still is, but “the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”, and how else would it or could it be?

When I finally returned to San Francisco in late 1969 after spending months as a hermit in the high Sierras, I moved in with some friends I had met while still a seminarian, and who were active in the Peace effort. They lived in the Haight-Asbury District – the colorful home of the Hippie Movement.  One day I picked up and read the Bhagavad Gita – an ancient Hindu Bible — and this little book had a profound and lasting impact on me. As I read the verse:

“He who does My work, who is devoted to Me and loves Me, who is free from attachment and from enmity to all beings, goes to Me.”

a resonant epiphany rang in my heart. I proceeded to look up meditation in the phone book, found a Zen Center nearby, and began studying Buddhist practices geared towards the discovery of the truth of one’s own nature. To really serve others, I realized that I needed to “know myself” first, and this seemed like a good place to start.

Many of my friends were now experimenting within the growing counter-cultural movement sweeping the nation, and I found myself living right in the epicenter of it. I eagerly drank in all that this new world was serving up, but what most appealed to me was the focus on universal love woven within the songs and proclamations of this emerging vision. Nevertheless, I had learned by now that vision without action is a dream, just as action without vision is a nightmare. I was still propelled by that early call to “do something” about all the suffering around me.

At the time, the Viet Nam War was in full flare and, having forsaken my theological deferment upon leaving the seminary, I soon became the recipient of the dreaded draft notice, requiring me to report for a physical in preparation for induction into the army. I did not want to shoot people, I only wanted to serve and nurture them. Consequently, I applied for Conscientious Objector status, necessitating an appearance before the Draft Board to argue my case.

When I stood before the esteemed assembly of citizens who were trying to turn me into a weapon in thrall to the military-industrial-banking complex, I explained as patiently as possible how wrong-headed it would be to send me on their killing errand. Apparently, my sincerity was convincing enough to Board, and so I began 2 years of Alternate Service as a Child Care Counselor at a residential school and treatment center in rural Northern California for emotionally scarred pre-adolescents.

I was assigned to a group of 10 very unhappy, abused, and bewildered boys that I came to love, and I carefully watched over them, and also made sure that they ate properly. I had the kitchen substitute fresh fruits and vegetables for the standard white sugar and flour products, and eliminate institutional processed foods as much as possible. Rather than letting them sit around and watch violent cartoons on the weekends, I would load them into the van and take them to the parks and beaches of Northern California, and let these inner-city kids get the feeling for the freedom to be found in nature. At bedtime, I would give them tender backrubs, and tell them little stories to ease them into the night.

It quickly became apparent to me that the common source of these kids’ disturbance was a profound wound at the emotional heart of their being — they had found out early, and invariably violently, that they were not loved, and so I was moved in my way to address this with them, and by grace I was opened to a previously unplumbed depth of my own heart to compensate or balance the hurt in theirs. I literally fell in love with them, to the point that they recognized my love for them as real, and their behavior began to modify as they came to trust this love.

Of course, I was totally delinquent when measured against the conventional medical establishment’s rules and standards. In the evenings, we would all do a bit of guided meditation, and they fell asleep without being dosed with their prescribed sleeping pills, and in fact I gradually stopped giving them their anti-psychotic meds, because they had ceased their acting out and were developing relational skills which allowed them to deal with their anger and frustration in a more natural manner.

Within several months, my group began to stand out from the others at the treatment center, since there were hardly any episodes of violence or acting out that characterized the other units’ daily behavior. In fact, we all had more and more pure fun together, and were eventually touted by the administration as an example of successful “rehab” work to visiting authorities. After about a year, the staff psychologists decided to study my group in depth to determine why they appeared to be making such rapid progress, compared to the other units, and of course that’s when they found out I had weaned the boys from the heavy chemical straight-jackets that had previously been used to artificially manage and control their behavior. I had replaced drugs with hugs, more hugs, a natural life style, listening, yes, and even meditation – I had begun studying Zen with Suzuki Roshi at the time, and applying his teaching to child care, and they all loved their morning and evening “mendatation”.

Naturally, the bureaucratic shrinks were flabbergasted, and promptly fired me. The dear children all gathered a petition on their own to keep me there, but I had violated the prime directive — do not mess with the pharmaceutical protocols, regardless if they’re poisoning the children!

As grace would have it, I soon thereafter got a letter from the Government indicating that my services were no longer required to fulfill any remaining Alternative Service duties, and so my next stop turned out to be Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery. I still often think of those kids, and so many millions more like them, and how rare it is in this world that even a handful come through to peace and rest, all armor laid down like Prasad at the feet of the Beloved.

“God triumphs over the ruins of our plans.”

~St. Augustine

Two of my early passions had been music – all and any music – and audio gear. During my summer vacations home from the Seminary, I worked in various jobs to afford the latest pieces of sound tech equipment, and by the time I finally decided to leave the Seminary, I had assembled a marvelous system of stereophonic bliss, along with a substantial collection of cherished music. Rather reluctantly, I sold it all at a bargain price to a classmate in order to finance my coming months, and have never regretted that decision.

Plans, plans! Yes, since as early as I can remember, I had felt a call to serve the Sacred. There was an intuition of palpable Mystery that invited my most profound response. It was an inexplicable impulse, even prior to memory, that became framed within the Irish Catholic zeitgeist of my childhood conditioning. At the age of 13, I embarked upon a 7-year odyssey through the inner sanctum of priestly training. I entered the Seminary in the fervor and naiveté of my youth, and left a disillusioned cynic. Yes, the ruins of our plans!

With the realization that I had superimposed a fictitious belief system on my innocent yearning, all but strangling it in the dry dogmatic grip of an impotent, life-denying, and soul-deadening religious superstructure, I walked away with a Frisbee, a few hundred dollars, and my first beard.

Several years earlier, a friend of my father’s had lent us his cabin in the high Sierras for a week of summer trout fishing, and we had returned to the area in succeeding years for vacations. Deep in the old Gold Rush territory made famous by the original “Forty-Niners”, the North Fork of the Yuba River cuts a crystal clear swath through this majestic mountain range. The primal hum of ancient and yet ever-fresh and innocent power vibrates alive through vast forests of giant Evergreen Firs, inviting a remembrance of our own earthy origins.

The day I left the Seminary in 1969, I drove home in my third-hand Ford Falcon, packed my fishing rod, a tent, a sleeping bag, a little hibachi grill, a couple of pairs of jeans, a sweatshirt, and a flashlight. I stopped off at the food store for some supplies, and then sat down for a farewell dinner with my bewildered family. They were almost speechless in their despair, having counted on me to pave the way heavenward for them as their own in-house divinity broker. Not only had I just dropped out of the Seminary, but I was apparently getting ready to drop off the face of the civilized world. There was nothing I could really say by way of explanation that they would understand, and so I just said something like: “I’m going to see what life wants to do with me…” And left it at that.

The next morning I got up at dawn, gassed up the car, and motored off across the Golden Gate Bridge on my way north to the mountains, the river, the forests, and whatever lay ahead, patiently waiting to reveal itself. I was smiling broadly, and realized that it had been a very long time since I had really smiled like that, with my whole being.

About 4 hours later, I was meandering serenely along Highway 49, a two-lane road running parallel to the river of my chosen sojourn, when I spotted a pull-off road to an abandoned campsite. I took the turn, and eased down a precipitous dirt track that wound narrowly for about 10 minutes, eventually depositing me at a slight clearing adjacent to the riverbank. There was a weathered poster board at the base of the trail, with a barely legible inscription designating the spot as “Convict Flats”. There was a brief story attached, which told of a now century-old episode of escaped convicts, and their eventual capture, at this very site. There were no other current campers, since it was way before the season, and it appeared that the area had seen little recent use. I pulled the car into the shade of an inviting Evergreen, cleared the space of some fallen limbs, and set up camp. This was to be my home for the next half year, or as long as the trout would oblige. I had traded my music for a different song – the sound of the breeze sifting through the trees, the sound of river caressing the canyon, and the sound of my soul, opening once more for the very first time.

It was a very warm afternoon, and after settling in, I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the icy stream. The ecstatic thrill of this naked baptism felt like an immediate cleansing of caked residue accumulated from my previous life. I regularly repeated this ritual over the coming months, surrendering myself more and more deeply to the amazing grace of flowing, redeeming water.

Then I was suddenly hungry, hungrier than I had been in a long time!  However, there was no refrigerator here, nor kitchen, nor some contingent of tiny French-Canandian nuns dedicated to keeping clergy-to-be fat and happy. My dinner was swimming in the same river from which I had just emerged, and my kitchen was the small hibachi grill, waiting patiently for its intended culinary guests.

I strung my fishing rod with a Mepps Spinner lure, which I knew from previous outings offered an irresistible seduction to the local rainbow trout, and then searched for and found a likely pooling eddy for my first cast.

Bingo!

A 14-inch beauty almost stripped the rod from my hands, leaping high above the rushing stream and tearing the monofilament line hotly off my reel. Impaled on a shaft of late-afternoon mountain sunlight, the moment seemed to open a rift in the ordinary progression of time, and it was only the insistent throb and tug of the rod that returned me to the matter in hand.

After a setting the hook with a sharp jerk, I battled the sleek river wonder onto the shore, and sat back against a boulder, watching my first mountain meal flopping futilely in the waning light. I thanked it for its sacrifice, reached down, and snapped its neck. There was a brief and fleeting stab in my heart at the death now wrapped in my hands. Nevertheless, any further rumination was quickly supplanted by the growls from my stomach, and I must say here that fresh rainbow trout, immediately grilled on an open flame and consumed outdoors in the mountains at dusk, is a gustatory delight rarely matched by any fine restaurant cuisine.

Later that evening, I lit a small fire and sat out under the Milky Way’s brilliant canopy, simply awe-struck by the beauty of the star field spinning slowly overhead. As the smoke drifted lazily into the clear night sky, I came to feel my body as just one of an infinite number of points of my own awareness, like a winking sun in a vast ocean of conscious starry being that I Am. This feeling shone so strong it opened up my hands. My heart was brimming with love, a love that wanted to ripple out into an endless embrace. There was a kind of urgency to it, a feeling that being itself was pressing into every obscure nook and cranny of itself to kiss itself awake. As the fire burnt down into glowing embers, I knew that I had made the right choice by coming here, and soon I was snuggled in my down sleeping bag, lulled to sweet oblivion by the gentle coursing hymn of the river.

When I awoke the next morning, the music of the river had become part of me. No longer a dear companion, it was now what I was. Over the coming months this realization began to extend to the mountains, the trees, the fish, the sky, the stars, and the beloved moon that visited in a different guise each night. Today, however, I walked out into the stream up to my hips and felt my whole body come alive to itself.

It occurred to me then that freedom – the vital pulsing feeling of freedom – is the birthright of everyone, everything. It is only the superimposition of a whole litany of wry beliefs and second-hand programs that ever obscures what it actually is. At the moment, in this fresh and brilliant morning wonder, I reached into the crystal stream and, with cupped hands, scooped water from the flow and anointed my head with the tingling ecstasy of mindless abandon. Yes – I was free! How had I ever imagined that I was ever anything less than this?

In the following weeks, I settled into a pattern-less pattern, allowing my intuition to take precedence over my previously conceptual approach to experience, time, and perception. It became increasingly obvious that the body has its own wisdom, and by re-connecting with that, I was also being re-established in the naturally unified condition of life’s spontaneous flow.

Sometimes I would just find a favorite boulder, and watch the river flow. Sometimes I might hike up into the Evergreens, and let my footsteps lead me wherever they wanted, pausing occasionally to just breathe in the fresh aromas of the forest, or listen to the bird music echoing from tree to tree in a symphony of ordinary delight. At other times, I would wander along the river’s banks, sometimes crossing in shallow sections, sometimes just stretching out on the surface and letting the water take me where it wanted.

Afloat on the mystery, gazing up into the endlessness of blue, I relaxed into the boundless sense of perfection inherent in this beauty. Prior memories drained away, and with them any sense of past or future. The presence of Now – this moment – became the glowing stage on which all appeared and dissolved. I began to realize that I was happy – not in some gleeful way, but just relaxed into a confidence that, no matter what, all is well. In fact, this happiness was my original state, except when I tended to slip into some fixation on any of it out of old habit and forget my true infinity.

It was here that I first read about Zen Buddhism in a little book a friend had lent me, and where I had my first modest experience (or taste) of the awakening to which Zen pointed. As I sat on a boulder by the river, contemplating what I had been reading, I was suddenly struck by the realization that everything was just appearing as itself, being itself, perfectly and completely. The trees were just treeing, the stream was streaming, I was self-ing, and it was all connected in a most amazing way. There was nothing in need of fixing or manipulating — total freedom was always and already the case! There was nothing to search for, nothing in need of redemption, nothing to grasp or discard. I burst out laughing at the obviousness of it all, as shivers of ecstatic release coursed through my body.

The next few months washed by in kind of dreamy timeless flow. I now felt stitched into the very fabric of existence, and days would pass with barely a thought. I wandered through the streams, swam with the trout, strolled through the woods, or just sat for hours on my rock – lost in silent union with the river’s ceaseless music. Night followed day, day followed night, and occasionally I would notice that my beard had really grown. In the reflecting window of my car, I now saw something of a wildman peering back, but he always seemed to have a happy smile. I had found some berry bushes back in the woods during one of my excursions, and these delicious fruits had replaced the relieved fish population for many an evening meal. I ran out of cigarettes, but never bothered to buy more during my infrequent trips into town.

Most days were lit with brilliantly clear blue skies, but as I sat out on my boulder by the river one morning, communing with the Mystery, the sky suddenly darkened and a fierce wild wind blew up the canyon. Next came a deafening crash of an immense thunderclap that reverberated forever, echoing off the stone walls of the canyon and threatening my eardrums. I inadvertently hollered back “Wahoo!” at the top of my voice, but immediately was blinded by a bolt of flashing white lightning that followed the monstrous thunder. The titanic relay of thunder and lightning rounds continued on for some minutes, but I had already crawled down under the over-hanging cover of the boulder when the rains came at last. It was just then that I noticed the river stones themselves seemed huddled and expectant at the oncoming deluge, and as each new raindrop splashed and glazed them, every stone remembered its home in the domain of liquid light – the very source of all of us.

The warm rain following the celestial pyrotechnics eventually gave way to a clearing, and with the return of sunlight came a vibrant rainbow stretching across the canyon. I was standing transfixed in jaw-dropping awe of this incredible vision of multi-colored splendor arcing up before my eyes when it occurred to me that my time there in the mountains was complete. I stood up and bowed to the rock, and to the river, and to the trees and wind and sun and sky, headed back to pack my gear, and drove south – although it really could have been in any direction.

As I drove away from Convict Flats, my home for the last 6 months, I flipped on the car radio. Some gospel group was singing a slow tender version of “Amazing Grace”, and as I hummed along, tears flowed freely down my cheeks, but I was smiling – it was such a beautiful day!

At the Catholic elementary school in which I was enrolled in the 1950’s, the usual curriculum routine was occasionally set aside for “Audio-Visual” presentations. Students were gathered into the auditorium, lights were dimmed, and the whir of a film projector signaled the beginning of another movie about precautions to be observed in the event of a nuclear attack. This one was different, however. I was 9 years old, and as I watched the flickering images of babies, covered with swarming flies, dying of starvation in some country I had never heard of, my own young heart was in a desperate turmoil.

By the end of the film, I was on the verge of passing out from the ordeal, until the lights came on and an earnest missionary appeared in front of the assembled students. As I listened intently to this “Soldier of Christ”, the mission which was soon to dominate the first half of my life took form. In a fantasy vision of service not unlike shouldering the cross of the sweet savior Jesus, the task before me was suddenly and undoubtedly made clear.

The missionary promised that, if each student was able to somehow contribute $5.00, they would be able to adopt one of these “pagan babies”. Not only would it be “saved” but, as a side benefit, each child would get to share the name of the contributor who had donated the sum.

Five dollars seemed like a lot of money, but no obstacle was going to deter me in my newfound crusade. I immediately threw myself into a fervor of coin collecting. I started out using all of my milk money, but found that wasn’t nearly enough. Every minute another child was dying! I began going into my father’s pants pocket at night, after my parents went to sleep. Each time I would take just a few dimes or nickels to contribute, reasoning that they didn’t need the money as much as the pagan babies. I approached all of my visiting relatives, as well as my parents’ friends, soliciting spare change for the mission. I would search the street on my way to and from school, looking for any fallen coins that might go to the cause.

Soon I broadened my view to include the neighborhood as potential recipients of goodwill. I began to take my bagged lunch and parcel elements of it into people’s mailboxes as I walked up the hill to school. I felt that it was better for me to go hungry than to have anybody else in the world go hungry. By the time I arrived at class, I had an empty bag but my heart was a little fuller.

Next I got a job as a paper boy, rising when it was still dark to travel the streets delivering the news and forwarding my earnings towards the pagan babies. I felt that I was doing something, but it was just not enough. The pagan babies needed all the help they could get.
The nuns were amazed at my fund raising. Somewhere in Africa there were now, hypothetically, at least a dozen people bearing my name, saved from a life of certain starvation. I did not feel good about this, however. There were so many more! So many! It seemed the task was hopeless. How could I save them all?

Meanwhile, my parents started getting calls from the neighbors, thanking them for the bananas and sandwiches, but asking for the rationale behind such postal contributions. When my father and mother confronted me, I told them about the starving children, the desperate suffering pagan babies. They were not as convinced as I that giving my lunch to the neighbors was the best tactic, nor were they amused when I confessed that I had been taking their money to fund my campaign to alleviate world hunger.

I sank into a profound dilemma about the whole thing. I wanted to give everything — my life even — to save others from suffering. I could not bear to see anyone suffer! I felt no peace, knowing that the pagan babies were crying for milk somewhere. The situation seemed unresolvable.

By the time I turned 12, I had already decided to enter a Catholic seminary to become a priest and dedicate myself completely to a life of unselfish service. Everyone seemed to agree that this was the best thing, given my unusual inclinations.

Over the course of the next 7 years in the Seminary, I spent a great deal of time studying the various texts, performing the many prescribed rituals, and was always at the top of my class academically, though I found that the more I examined how this religion had become rigidly institutionalized, focusing on fear and guilt, dogmas and prohibitions, as opposed to love and freedom, compassion and forgiveness, the less I was convinced that it had any actual merit, beyond serving as a social control mechanism operated by questionable people with even more questionable motives. Finally, I asked for a personal interview with the Archbishop of San Francisco. This went rather poorly, and I left with the clear sense that this person had never actually experienced anything that he preached about. He was dead inside.

After too many years barking up the wrong tree, I walked away disgusted with the whole decrepit institution and moved to the high Sierras to cleanse myself, spending the next 6 months living as a hermit in a small tent by a river. This was quite refreshing, and then one day an old friend dropped by to visit, and left me with a copy of a book on Zen. I devoured this book, since it was like a reminder of my time prior to getting involved with the salvation-business. When I came upon one particular passage – a little poem about trees just treeing – everything suddenly fell into place. How obvious it all was!

Not long afterward, I returned to San Francisco, looked up “meditation” in the phone book, and came upon the San Francisco Zen Center. I called them up, they said “Come on down!” There I met Suzuki Roshi, and I became his student that night. It was the right thing to do!

What followed included a stint as a Child Care worker (to satisfy the requirements of Alternative Service to the Government), then several years dedicated to training as a Zen Buddhist monastic, which in turn was followed by a 30 year career as a successful businessman pioneering the introduction of Natural and Organic products across the country. It seems I still wanted to feed the people, so I figured it might as well be with the best food I could find. I helped start the largest whole foods chain in the nation, and then went on to support and guide hundreds of farmers, manufacturers, retailers, and distributors in converting to Natural and Organic products and cultivation methods.

Somewhere along the way a simple recognition dawned (perhaps stimulated by a rather dramatic near death experience resulting from a harrowing automobile accident), a clear and obvious realization that my whole life-long quest had been based on a false premise. All along, I had assumed myself to be a separate individual, trying to bridge an assumed chasm in my own being. I had superimposed on this simple being all sorts of beliefs and solipsistic judgments about myself as the one who is “doing” all of this, and then projected that dreamy made-up stuff out into “the world” — as if “the world” was somehow separate from myself. All along I had been repeatedly graced with clues, but I have always been a stubborn sort. In my earnest fixation on an idea of what I needed to become, and what the world needed from me, I overlooked some plain and simple truths:

I can’t become what I already am. I only need to cease presuming myself and the world to be other than what I and it have always been. In fact, the very notion of doership is an arrogance and a trap that blinds and binds. Everything, just as it is, is already saved, perfected, and free beyond any limiting ideas I could ever superimpose on it.

As layers of self-inflicted dilemma melted away, I finally realized how arrogant my stubborn belief had been — the assumption that I could ever be in a position of “saving” anybody. The crusade story I’d been acting out was full of holes. As that house of cards came crumbling down, the whole fictional fist of contraction loosened its grip.

How could I have ever imagined myself to be in any kind of position to impose my will on life! I came to realize that we are not here so much to change human life as to be changed by our experience of it. When I recognized that I was the “Pagan Baby”, everything returned to an ordinary happiness, fatefully interrupted by that schoolhouse movie so many years ago. I was somehow gracefully relieved of the concern that anything be other than what it is, or that I be anything other than what I am.

I could finally stop pretending. I could peel off the various costumes, or perhaps maintain the costume — knowing that it is just a costume, and even enjoying the unique beauty of this and any costume. I came to see that all these costumes will slip off on their own accord, in their proper time. All we need do is let them go, without resistance or regret.

There are no barriers in life, except what we might imagine in our innocent misunderstandings. Even these are a kind of perfection and grace. Even our apparent hardships are gifts, granted to us so that we might deepen in self-awareness. In truth, there is nothing and nobody to save. There is neither freedom nor bondage as we’ve imagined. In reality, all is and has always been and will always be well.

Q: I may remove my causes of sorrow, but others will be left to suffer.

 Nisargadatta Maharaj: To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. Your own desires and fears prevent you from understanding and thereby helping others. In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the sufferings of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have – yourself.

It was to be the last summer of our childhood, although at the time we had only the vaguest sense that this incandescent chapter of our lives was finally coming to an end. We were too enraptured in the glorious freedom that our recent graduation from St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Grammar School had bestowed upon us that jubilant final day of May.

We had not as yet really started to envision the future, which stretched out before us like some vast incomprehensible ocean of possibilities on which we were reluctant to set sail, so vivid and delightful was the shoreline of the present.

It was 1959, and only much later were we to realize that it was not just our own individual childhood that was passing into the obscure compartments of memory, but the innocence of an entire nation was about to undergo the inevitable metamorphosis that the next decades would witness.

By now it was mid-June, and the summer looked like it was going to go on forever. In the back of our minds, however, we knew that September was just around the corner, and some of our friends had already made final preparations for high school. Eric and I were careful to avoid the topic, since it threatened to mark the end of our friendship as we had known it all these years.

Eric’s father was a butcher at Larry’s Meat Market over in the Sunset District of San Francisco, and could not afford the tuition at the local Catholic High School, and so had enrolled him for the fall semester at Lafayette Public High.

I had determined that the best way to God and sainthood was service through the priesthood, and so had committed to a Catholic Seminary down on the peninsula south of San Francisco, which meant that I would only be home for vacations.

Eric and I had been best friends for most of our lives. We had grown up in houses across the street from each other at the bottom of the hill that led up to St. Thomas Church and Grammar School. We had walked up and down that same old hill together for eight years, in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood known for its large families. Our own respective households were relatively small by comparison – Eric had two sisters and I had two younger brothers and a sister.

On warm summer evenings more than a hundred kids on the block would pour out of their homes after dinner and line up on opposite sides of the street for games of Capture the Flag. It was great fun, but night fell far too soon, and all but the oldest were called back into their homes to settle down and prepare for bed. Television had yet to reduce us all to hypno-zombies, and outside of the few favorite shows that everybody watched, Eric and I were content to sit out on the front stairs with a couple of friends, perhaps listening to a ball game on the transistor radio, talking about cars, or planning on how we were finally going to catch Houdini.

While we were growing up, Golden Gate Park was a magical Emerald Forest just down the block from us, spreading out for miles from Ocean Beach all the way up to Stanyan Street in the middle of the city. It was a magnificent, endless Realm where every boy’s fantasies could be fulfilled, and whose multitude of attractions could take years to explore.

On sunny summer mornings Eric and I would pool our allowances, load up on snacks and sodas for the trip, and set out on our bikes for voyages of discovery that took us through that vast wonderland. Every conceivable adventure awaited us, and there was never enough time, it seemed, to exhaust the full measure of the park’s possibilities.

During that final summer, however, one special area of the park was to capture and dominate our imagination unlike any of the others, and that was Spreckles Lake. Technically not really a lake, Spreckles was a large man-made pond about two blocks long and a block wide, skirted by a gravelly oval asphalt walkway on which mothers strolled their babies and old folks gossiped and reminisced on green wooden benches in the lush shade of the surrounding trees. A wonderful assortment of gnarly Monterey pines, fragrant Eucalyptus, and gently drooping Willows bordered the pond, with a thick grove of Evergreens leading away to the south and down towards the beach a mile away.

A quaint boathouse stood at one end of the pond, from which intricate scale models, some up to five feet in length, of famous sailing ships, were regularly wheeled out by dapper gentlemen to be admired by onlookers and then carefully launched on Spreckle’s placid waters. The owners would follow their ships’ progress by walking along the banks with long poles, which they would occasionally use to steer the boats back out into the pond when they veered too close to the shore.

All the while, colorful schools of oriental carp, called Koi, would dart in and out of view beneath the surface. Some of them had grown to impressive size, and would always elicit excited shouts and finger pointing from children when they glided close to shore, flashing brilliant colors of orange and gold beneath the opaque waters.

The koi shared the lake with more common carp varieties, as well as schools of Blue Gill perch , and the ever-present Cray fish, which we called Crawdaddies, that congregated on the shallow sides of the banks and were fun to catch with a piece of bacon tied to a string.

For as long as we remembered, there was the legend of an ancient giant carp that was said to lurk in the deeper regions of Spreckles, out towards the middle of the lake. Supposedly, he had roamed the waters since the pond was first built, frustrating several generations of determined young fishermen who had cast their lines to no avail, eventually retreating to the lesser challenges of daily life, and wistfully regretting the “one that got away”. On rare occasions a roiling ferment would erupt from beneath the wind-blown lapping waves, followed by the bronze glint of some formidable aquatic creature’s back, top fin, and tip of tail as it breached the surface and then dived down and out of view.

Eric and I were peacefully dipping for Crawdads one late June afternoon. The slant of the sun settling just over the trees was casting that soft, hushed, honeyed spell that lingered lovingly over everything it touched, suffusing the world with a serene glow, and imparting an air of blissful, gilded enchantment to the entire park.

Suddenly we were startled out of our reveries by a flop, a splash, and then the golden flash of that carp we were to name “Houdini”, and who was to become our grand and passionate obsession during that final, fleeting summer of 1959. For the rest of June and throughout July we were to ponder the various strategies, both common and arcane, that had been handed down in carp lore around the lake through rumors and conjectures regarding the supreme method with which to capture the beast.

Some swore by live bait, such as worms, large insects, and even smaller fish. Others had devised an assortment of artificial lures with which they hoped to trick the monster. Fly fishers had flung flies to no avail, while fish egg folk had fooled only a few dumb Crawdads with their fish eggs.

Various incantations, prayers, and mental states were suggested as prerequisites for engaging the contest, as if one could somehow tune into the same aquatic wavelength as the fish and thereby gain advantage. Nor were lucky amulets and charms, such as rabbits’ feet and scapulas of St. Peter the Patron Saint of fishermen, discounted in pursuit of the mini-Moby Dick. All these means and more were ventured, and all had come to naught, and eventually the end of the summer was fast approaching.

It was an elderly Asia gentleman, cane in hand, who tottered over to us from his park bench one morning where he had been feeding the birds and, in broken English, gave us our first really useful clue. He had been observing us for the past month, he claimed, although we had never taken any notice of him.

“Bread balls” was all he said, but in a manner of such serene confidence that he could have passed for one of the buddhas in the Japanese Tea Garden.

“Bed bowls?” we questioned, at first unable to comprehend his meaning.

“See?” he replied, and reaching into a crumpled brown paper bag, withdrew a slice of white bread. First he tore the bread into smaller pieces, and then proceeded to roll each piece into a ball. He motioned for us to put the balls on our hooks and cast them out into the water.

We looked at each other, shrugged, and followed his instruction. I was the first to get my line out, and Eric’s soon plopped out near mine. The old man retreated to his bench to watch. Within minutes he was rewarded with the sight of his new pupils successfully hauling two fat splashing carp out of the water and up onto the pavement, where they flopped together in wild syncopation like some animal act on Ed Sullivan’s TV show!

This was not Houdini by any means, but as we released the fish back into the pond, we both agreed that we has finally made an important breakthrough. The hunt was on in earnest now. We pooled our meager resources to purchase our first bag of Wonder Bread, certain that Victory was at hand. Eric brought a five gallon plastic bucket, which we planned to fill with water and use to transport Houdini to Eric’s small backyard pond. The pond was about five feet in diameter, and several feet deep, and we imagined that it would be the perfect place for Houdini to live out his life in captivity. It would be a shrine to our triumph, and a lasting reminder of our friendship.

It was not going to be as easy, however, as we had first assumed in the fervor of our recent discovery. Sure, we caught plenty of small carp, and even some perch with our bread balls, but the true object of our desire continued to elude us. Once Eric might have even had him, but the string was pulled from his hands in a sudden vicious tug that caught him off guard while he was daydreaming. We could only watch in stunned dismay as his fishing gear flew out into the water and disappeared beneath the surface. It was just too much for us that day. Bitterly disappointed, we decided to seek diversion in the evergreen groves behind Spreckles. The giant Conifers must have pre-dated the park itself, for some of the more mature specimens had grown to over a hundred feet in height, and offered branches that proved irresistible for climbing. Seated near the top of one of the tallest, you could look down all the way to the ocean a mile away. Swaying in the gentle summer winds, you might even encounter curious hummingbirds face to face.

Earlier that summer I had scaled one of these giants by myself — right up to the very top. While perched in the thinning branches, swaying in the glorious freshness of intoxicating sea breezes streaming over the forest, two bright and multicolored hummingbirds zoomed into view and paused mid-air a foot from my astonished face. Instantly I felt my attention gather at a point above my eyes and then, remarkably, just rush out of me and link with the tiny birds as we darted together from tree top to tree top, ecstatic in an enormous thrill of Being! The overwhelming heartthrob of Vitality propelling us was nearly too much to contain, and I starkly intuited that unconditional surrender to this…Feeling… would mean the end of “me”. A buried memory from earlier years swam briefly into consciousness, catalyzing a rude return to normal embodiment and, still dizzy from the shock of that fleeting remembrance, I nearly lost my grasp and fell.

Nevertheless, Eric and I picked one of those giants to climb that day, and had almost made it to the top when we heard voices rising from the ground below us. Peering down through the thick branches, we spotted two park police mounted on horseback at the very base of our tree, apparently unaware of us as they chatted and passed a cigarette back and forth. Obviously one of them didn’t know how to smoke, since he kept coughing every time he inhaled.

When I looked over to Eric, he placed his index finger to his lips, motioning for silence. Then he smilingly proceeded to unzip his fly, and to my horror, commenced to drizzle a stream of urine down through the branches and onto the waiting helmets below. I was flabbergasted, and almost lost my footing on the limb.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING! I glared at Eric, who whispered back that they couldn’t see us from down there.

“You moron!” I muttered beneath my breath, but it was true. We were actually invisible from our high nesting point. I heard one of the cops exclaim “What the hell?”, and we could both now barely keep from cracking up.

When they finally sauntered off, we burst out into hysterical fits of laughter, and when we eventually clambered back down, we were so revved up that we decided to head over to the Buffalo Compound for some more fun.

Not far away from the lake and the forest grove a herd of real buffalo grazed on a few acres of penned-in land, right in the middle of the park. Most of the time we took them for granted, but today was going to be different. The earlier event in the tree had left us feeling bold and invincible, and we were ready to try something really wild.

When we reached the chain link fence, we spotted three adult buffalo and a calf not far from us, peacefully chewing their cuds (or whatever they chew), their tails occasionally flicking up to swat flies, appearing for all intents and purposes to be about as tame and benign as a bunch of furry cows.

We glanced at each other, and then, without pausing to consider the wisdom of what we were about to do, scaled the fence and jumped over into the compound. Eric, the crazier of the two of us that day, headed straight for the calf, intending I supposed to try and pet it. I was mistaken. His plan, impromptu though it may have been, was to hop onto the young animal’s back and try to ride it.

“No, Eric!” I screamed, but it was already too late. As he began to climb the calf, one of the older buffalo (probably the mother) became understandably alarmed at Eric’s behavior, determining that he now represented an unacceptable threat. There was none of the expected hoof pawing of the ground and snorting like we had seen on TV westerns. Rather, the beast simply lowered its head and began a gallop that quickly turned into a full charge.

Eric was now in a sprint for his life. I was already half way up the fence when I saw him go flying headlong to the ground, his arms outstretched before him as if he was diving for home plate. In fact, he had slipped on a big fresh buffalo patty, and was now in imminent danger of becoming an Ericburger himself.

Without stopping to ponder the pros and cons I leapt from the fence and began jumping up and down on the ground, waving my arms wildly and shouting at the charging animal to distract its attention from my prone and hapless friend. For some inane reason, the only words I could summon came from the current pop song “My Friend the Witchdoctor”.

“Ooh Eee Ooh ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang!” I screamed at the top of my voice. Eric shot me a bewildered glance, but the words and actions somehow had the desired effect. The buffalo stopped dead in its tracks, and was now considering me with a wide-eyed stare approximating both surprise and confusion.

This stalemate lasted just long enough for Eric to scamper back to the fence, but then the buffalo resumed its charge, only this time it was coming for me.

I quickly turned and jumped towards the fence, scaling it as fast as my trembling limbs could manage. I was near the top when the full impact of the animals’ momentum combined with the give of the linked fence to create a whipsaw effect that flung me back over its head and body and back into the pen again. I landed flat on my back, and thousands of tiny twinkling dots swarmed before my eyes. My vision cleared in a moment, and though I was basically undamaged, the spreading liquid in my jeans revealed my bladder’s surrender.

Strangely, the buffalo now stood motionless, its huge head pressed against the fence as if in the thrall of some mystic revelation. I looked at Eric, who now stood on the other side of the fence, one finger tapping his lips for quiet while his other hand waved me over. I didn’t need an invitation as I carefully arose and tip-toed away from the beast, circling to his left and towards the fence.

As I began to scramble back up the chain links, the buffalo gave a sharp snort, slowly backed up, turned, and nonchalantly ambled back to his friends, who must have been quite amused by the whole spectacle.

Eric was waiting for me when I hit the ground to safety. Wow, that was really cool!” he blurted, unable to contain his manic glee.

“You idiot! You stupid moron! Look at you, covered in Buffalo doo! You almost got us both killed!” I blared back at him.

“Yeah, but hey, it was really great the way you saved my life and everything!” he replied, unfazed by my accusations. “Oooh Eee Oooh ah ah…how did you come up with that one?”

We stared at each other for a long moment, and then simultaneously broke out in laughter. Never had we felt more alive than at this very moment, and we were flooded with such joyous unbridled emotion that it seemed as if we would burst.

Eventually we cleaned ourselves up in the public facilities near the Polo Field, and then wandered through the horse stables to the grounds themselves. We sang bits and pieces of our favorite current pop songs in ragged unison: “The Battle of New Orleans”, “Sink the Bismark”, “John Henry”, “Purple People Eater”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “Surfin’ Safari”, and others long since forgotten.

The wide gravel racetrack that encircled the stadium formed an oval mile, bordering an Olympian expanse of grass that could have contained four football fields. We wandered out onto the green and flopped down somewhere in the middle of the vast field. The immense blue dome of sky above us was dotted with occasional white puffs of clouds, and we spent some time just lying there, concentrating our combined psychic energies on evaporating them one at a time.

This was amusing for awhile, but soon our conversation drifted back to the subject of Houdini. We had to admit that time was growing short, and we had yet to fulfill our summer’s vow of capturing the King of Carp. Although we had had some great fun that day, it sobered us to recall that the morning had started with the loss of Eric’s fishing tackle to what might have been Houdini himself.

“What now?” I wondered aloud.

“Let’s get some candy bars” was Eric’s reply. When in doubt or need of inspiration, we like most kids, had come to rely on the trusty boost of sugar.

Suddenly it hit me – SUGAR! That’s it!

“Eric” I began, “what if Houdini was just like us, and really liked candy and sweets, you know, like for dessert?”

So what do you mean” Eric snickered, “like we should use Milky Ways or Three Musketeers for bait?”

“No, no” I replied, “but how about if we were to roll some bread balls up with sugar?”

“Hey, it’s worth a try. After all, we only have a couple of days left” Eric shrugged, and with that the subject which we had been avoiding so carefully the last few weeks was finally broached. Our summer was indeed almost gone, and our lives were about to change in ways we couldn’t even imagine. In our hearts we were clinging to these last few precious days, as if somehow we knew instinctively that they marked the conclusion of a glorious time that would never come again. As we lay there on our backs at the Polo Field, with the passing clouds now starting to fill with the light of the lowering sun, we felt suddenly, and acutely, the poignant inevitability of change. Time itself was beginning to seem a bit less friendly, and we did not really want to ponder the implication.

“What about your fishing gear?” I asked, anxious to change the subject after a long minute of silence.

“Let’s just use yours, and I’ll hold the net. That’s if your idea really works, which I doubt,” Eric replied, unless our luck changes.”

“It will!” I vowed, with all the determination I could muster.

At that we rose and headed home. On the way we stopped off at Spreckles Lake, and were rewarded with the sight of something huge lazily breaking the surface right near the spot where we had first sighted Houdini. As we stood there on the edge of the pond in speechless awe, it was unmistakably obvious to us that we had just been challenged. We excitedly promised that we would be back the next day – no matter what – but Nature had other plans in store, and our contest would have to wait until a rainstorm cleared two days later.

It was now the final Saturday of our summer, and the early fog quickly gave way to a warm and brilliant morning. Eric met me with his net and bucket at our usual entrance to the park, and together we wordlessly hurried on to our unique rendezvous with destiny. I carried the bag of bread and a small box of sugar, along with my fishing gear, which included a hook that I had secretly dipped in the Holy Water fount at St. Thomas Church the day before. I figured that we needed all the help we could get. This day was probably going to be our last chance, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a little supernatural support as we mounted our final assault on that devilish creature.

When we reached the lake we carefully rolled the bread and sugar into small neat balls, and after a fervent prayer for victory, I cast my line out into the water and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Several hours of casts and retrievals followed, with soggy bread replaced by fresh balls, but we had yet to get so much as a nibble. We had begun to despair when the old Chinese man took his place on the bench near us. He beckoned us over and, reaching into his paper bag, pulled out some stale sourdough bread and said: Here. You try.”

“OK” we readily agreed this time, but I was still committed to my sugar strategy, and as we hollowed out the white inner core of the bread from the crust, I poured a little sugar over the spongy balls after moistening them with water. Once they had dried, I chose one of the larger ones to set on my hook, and then flung my line as far out as I could manage.

The first tug startled me, but I was careful not to yank the line prematurely. I leaned over and whispered to Eric that I was getting something when the line snapped taut in my hand, my heart skipped a beat, and I knew the battle was finally on. I was confident that the hook was set when the great head breached the surface, and when the rest of the body rolled and swished I heard Eric scream “It’s Houdini, it’s Houdini!”

The old Chinese was merrily chirping from his bench “Big fish, big fish! Oh, very big fish!”, but I had no time to reply. I was completely focused on the struggle now, and the whole wide world had been narrowly reduced to just this dance of the fisher and the fish.

Sensing that the line was perilously close to breaking, I slowly unwound my hand-held assembly, feeding more string into the water until the full hundred feet stretched out from me to the creature. I was already drenched in sweat when the fish headed off to the right in a terrific dash for freedom. I followed along the bank, trying to keep pace and holding on for dear life.

After dragging me several hundred feet in that direction, the carp abruptly reversed course, and now we were moving back to the left, passing our initial starting point and eventually nearly reaching the southernmost end of the pond. It was there that Houdini rallied with such a ferocious tug that I was toppled into the lake itself, though I stubbornly held fast to the line, winding it around my wrist with one arm while hauling myself back up onto the bank with the other.

Suddenly the line went slack. In a panic I thought I’d lost him. My heart stuck in my throat and I grew dizzy, verging on collapse. “No, noooo…!” I shouted at the lake, until I noticed that the line was still moving, arcing back around to the right and heading straight for the shore! This fish was full of tricks! I wound the slack as fast as I could, until a mere twenty feet separated me from him. He was now partially visible just beneath the surface in the shallows, his bronze scales reflecting the sunlight in a maddening tease that still failed to reveal his full dimensions.

In the meantime, Eric had filled his bucket to three quarters’ capacity and was sticking close by with his net. “Hang in there, buddy!” he grinned with encouragement.

“I’m hanging in. I’m hanging in!” I replied, but I was beginning to feel the effects of the exhausting struggle throughout my body – my mouth was parched, my limbs were quivering, and I really needed to pee.

“Take it for a minute” I pleaded to Eric, thrusting the line to him before he could argue and then dashing off into the bushes where I could barely unzip my wet fly, so numb and shaky were my fingers.

When I returned, Eric was halfway back to the original spot, dragged by the beast that was still in no mood to surrender. I snatched up the net and pail and raced to catch up. A small group of bystanders were beginning to crowd around us, and after Eric returned the line to me he spread his arms and waved them back.

The stalemate continued for what seemed like hours. Houdini was relentless and showed no signs of tiring. Eric and I took turns with the line, and by mid-afternoon we were both worn out. Time and again we would get the fish within sight, only to have him dive back and away. I was holding the line while Eric took his turn to rest when I first felt a change in the tension.

“Eric” I said, “I think he’s getting ready to give up.” Slowly, cautiously, I began to wind him in, one foot at a time. He now seemed sluggish, almost docile, perhaps at last ready to submit to the inevitable. My exhilaration mounted as I pulled him into full view, just a yard and a half now from the bank. Murmurs of awe arose from the onlookers, and Eric readied his net. I couldn’t believe the size of him! He looked to be over thirty pounds!

Perhaps it was the sight of the net that startled him, but just as Eric was dipping it into the water Houdini abruptly surged, splashed, and burned my fingers with the line as he tore back to open waters. Despite the blood and pain in my hands I refused to let go, and with all of my remaining strength I pulled him back, one length at a time, towards Eric’s waiting net. He was nearly within our grasp, at last, but getting him out of the water and onto land was going to pose a problem we had not anticipated.

Eric’s net was designed to accommodate much smaller fish, and Houdini’s massive bulk was going to render it useless. As I maneuvered the fish up to the shore, Eric slowly reached into the water with both arms and gingerly scooped him up, falling over backwards from his squatting position in the effort. The momentum of the fall carried Houdini over the bank, where he first landed smack in Eric’s face, and then squirted over onto the pavement, flapping and flailing spasmodically, lurching for the lake which would be his home no more. I dived down on top of him in a desperate embrace, while Eric removed the hook from his rubbery lip.

For a sudden, immense moment my eyes met Houdini’s, and they seemed so utterly forlorn, vulnerable, and vanquished that I almost lost my breath. My hummingbird heart fell dead in my chest, and in that timeless moment of crystalline truth, I knew with stark certainty that everything had already been lost.

Now Eric was grabbing him carefully by the gills, and I held the rest of him as we lifted him into the bucket. The five-gallon container was woefully inadequate for his size as we tried to coil him in and keep his head submerged in water. It was all happening so fast that we barely stopped to congratulate each other. Adrenaline competed with exhaustion as we gathered up our gear and prepared to race over to Eric’s backyard pond with our prize.

I turned to look for the old Chinese gentleman, hoping to spot him in the crowd that had gathered and thank him for his help, but he had somehow inexplicably vanished. Eric was tugging at my arm, and so we made our way around the pond, through the park, and back up our street to his house.

Once in his backyard, we carefully lifted the fish out of the container and gently lowered him into the water. For a minute he just floated on his side, and the terrible realization struck us that maybe it was too late. His gills were still moving, however, and he finally snapped out of his stupor, righted himself, and slowly began to explore his new home.

We breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief, and then Eric ran into the house to get some cokes to celebrate. “To Victory!” Eric exclaimed as we clicked our bottles together. I took a long thirsty swig, and then added: “You know, I heard that carp live really long lives. No matter what happens from now on, we can always meet here together, and remember all the great times we had, and we’ll always have Houdini to remind us!”

Then we toasted to our friendship, and to the future, which we were now at last ready to face, and especially to Houdini, who had by now settled quietly into the small pond. We tossed him the rest of the bread balls, but he didn’t seem too hungry, and they floated, untouched, to the bottom.

The next day, Sunday, was my last day of “freedom”, and I was reluctantly packing for my trip on Monday to the Seminary, which was going to be my new home for the next seven years. All sorts of conflicting emotions were bubbling and churning within me when I got the call from Eric. He sounded miserable, and said that I had better come over right away.

I raced over to his house, where he met me and immediately led me into the backyard. There, by the edge of the pond, lay the partially eaten remains of our magnificent Houdini. Some animal, maybe a raccoon, had gotten into the uncovered pond during the night and feasted on our fish. Tears welled up in my eyes, and we were speechless with horror and dismay. Our summer was over, Houdini was dead, and no magic existed that could bring any of it back.

We buried the corpse in Golden Gate Park, and with it our childhood. Little was spoken.

What could we say?

When we finished, we took a last long melancholy walk through the evergreen groves, so filled with boyhood memories amidst the filtered shards of sunlight.

We stopped at the pond, which seemed somehow so much smaller now.

“It will never be the same, will it, Eric?” I asked, but it was more of a statement than a question.

“No,” he replied, “it will never be the same.”

Today a blessed breeze carries me back more than half a century to a little pier that juts out adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, called Fort Point.

It is Sunday, and in the womb of that infinite afternoon, as I sit silently by my father, the two of us nominally fishing for crabs, the caw of fluttering seagulls echoes lazily in the warm wind.

Inhaling once again the intoxicating old creosote smeared on the pier’s pilings, stirred with the salty sea aromas and the richness of the lingering fish flavors drying out along the pier, I gaze out across the bay, which is speckled with the white sails of dozens of boats criss-crossing through the emerald waters.

Time dissolves in the perfection of this moment, and tears stream freely down my face. This was before I knew anything at all, and yet, sitting here in the midst of my reveries, I realize that everything I needed to know was known completely in that moment, and my father knew it too.

Now it all passes through me like this soft summer wind, and I am like a swinging door, no longer remembering in from out, past from present — just enjoying this breeze of memory, this afternoon in timelessness.

I was eight years old, and had just returned from the Catholic Youth Organization summer camp. When I stepped off the bus back in San Francisco, after 2 wonderful weeks of being on my own for the first time, I was so overwhelmed with joy to see my family again that I fell into a kind of swoon. In the process, the world which I had known up to this point, and which I had naturally taken to be all that is, was suddenly dissolved before me, as if it had all been a long day-dream, and now I was startled awake.

I do not know exactly what happened next, but when I opened my eyes, I was lying on a couch in my parent’s house. I realized that these people – my family — were not real, but more like dream characters. Yes, it was as if I had awoken from a dream, but I was somehow still within it, and I became fearful that I had somehow lost my mind. I wanted my family back!

I had no frame of reference for any of this, but then I became oddly detached from the fear, and began adapting to these strange new circumstances. I wanted things to be like they were before, but something told me that they never could be again – I had seen too much, and I could never go back to the reality I had once taken for granted. Now I had recognized it for its essential impermanence. It had no real substance. I now knew first-hand that whatever appears can just as easily disappear, that there is nothing solid to count on, nowhere to find certainty or security.

A man leaned over me. I recognized the family doctor, feeling my pulse, listening to my heartbeat through his stethoscope, and taking my temperature. All the while, there was only this “internal” sense of an I-presence, though not so much as an individual person, but more as a focus of awareness in the midst of an unfolding dreamscape. There seemed a very thin boundary separating inner and outer — an arbitrary one that depended on attention to hold it in place.

After some time, the doctor apparently could find nothing wrong, and we had a “welcome home” dinner later, while I attempted to adjust to a dramatically transformed perspective. I felt a strange mixture of familiarity and affection, combined with a new-found detachment, as I sat with my dream family. I had nothing to say, and I remained very quiet for a long time afterwards.

For the rest of the summer, I lay out on the backyard lawn, watching the clouds trailing through sky, and inhaling the fresh earth, redolent with the fragrance of growing things. If I allowed my attention to go there, I could enter into the tiny shoots of tubers and experience their sensations as they reached through the soil into the light – it was amazing!

At school in the fall, I lost all interest in the lessons, falling into the swoon more often than not. I would suddenly find myself in a room with other children, then I was somehow lying down in my backyard; it was night, it was day, none of it had any substantiality, everything was one piece, just like a piece of smoke. I was in love with this, but I didn’t know what any of it was, nor did it even matter – everything simply was what it was, empty and full, without need for naming or grasping.

People seemed familiar, but were weirdly interchangeable with trees, bicycles . . . it was all breathing, vanishing, appearing, changing; it was all transparent, it was me, but I didn’t know what that was — it didn’t even occur to me. It was already gone before it could solidify enough to be grasped, like river water flowing through one’s fingers.

Sometimes I would find that I had wandered 8 blocks or so down to the Pacific Ocean, through Golden Gate Park, and I was standing at the edge of the surf, but didn’t remember how I got there, so what — just the feel of the water lapping at my toes thrilled me with an indescribable ecstasy, there was no other day than this one.

Sometimes when I was asleep, I found myself practicing flying, and I was able to fly all over the neighborhood, swooping and diving and soaring at great speeds. At other times, I found myself in a kind of school environment, with a lot of other folks that I knew somehow, as if we were an old familiar group, and we weren’t children at all.

I also realized I had this huge love in my heart which felt like an intense hopeless ache — a kind of subtle wound which, if given attention, would prompt spontaneous tears, not of sadness, but a kind of ecstatic longing or divine homesickness. I really had/have no words that can describe it any better.

Anyway, I eventually began assuming the conventions of my young peers — joining in the sports games, laughing at the jokes, collecting baseball cards, and listening to the ingenious little portable transistor radios that had just come on the market. It was all a kind of game, like “Let’s Pretend”, although they all seemed to take everything so seriously, as if it was all real. At any rate, I went along. There was no resistance. It was “no big deal.” In time, it became second nature – just going along, pretending.

I was almost 6 when my father took me on my first vacation road trip away from home in San Francisco to visit his family in Bellingham, Washington, where I was to meet my his birth family for the first time. My grandfather, an old mountain man whose mother was a Dakota Blackfoot Indian, slapped me across the room when I first greeted him, laughing, “That’s for nothing!” My grandmother, originally a mail-order bride from Ireland, just shook her head and smiled nervously (probably all too familiar with his brutishness). I also met my uncles Father Fred the Monsignor, and Jim and Pat, and the next morning the men and me were up at the crack of dawn to set out on pack horses for a long hunting and fishing expedition into the northern wilds, traveling for almost a month into primal mountain country, far from even the smallest rural towns in that part of the state.

I rode my first horse and saw bear spoor and mountain lion footprints, and on the third day I found a single mammoth heart-shaped strawberry that must have weighed at least a pound blooming under a magic bush that had unmistakably called out to me. Along the way my grandfather and his sons filled an ice chest with the shiny rainbow trout they’d caught, gradually draining the previous cooler contents – multiple 6-packs of Olympia Beer. I was given soda pop.

One memorable night, well into the trip, we were camping out under the stars on the shore of a small and isolated mountain lake. I was awakened suddenly in the middle of the night by a dazzling sight which struck me with intense awe and wonder (and this for a kid who was already walking around a good part of the time in basic awe and wonder).

Out on the lake a brilliant fire had bubbled up from the very center and was fiercely blazing, as if a good-sized boat had gone up in flames, but there was nobody near us for miles and miles – the blaze had just appeared full blown, with no apparent source to feed it. I remember standing there, watching it, fascinated, until finally a thought appeared, and I was able to find voice enough to call my father and his gang out of their sleep to see it, and they saw it too, and were equally shocked by the vision, which now had taken a
shape not unlike a flaming angel, and none of them believed their own explanations. 

The next morning, there was no sight of anything, just the lake as it was the day before, and I do recall we had some good fishing that day, and they all drank a lot of Olympia beer.

My maternal Grandmother was quite a woman for her time, or anytime, for that matter. Born into an Irish Catholic family in Chicago on June 18, 1888, she entered this world with a twin brother – she was named Rose and he was named Bud. They were inseparably devoted to each other.

Bud became a policeman, and while trying to save a boy who had fallen onto the electric train tracks, was himself electrocuted. Shortly thereafter, while still in her early twenties, Rose’s first husband died of a sudden heart attack.

Refusing to give up on love, Rose met and married Louis, a Jew. Both she and Louis were banished from their respective family’s good graces for daring to cross the forbidden boundaries of inter-faith relationships, and so set out to make their way on their own.

They prospered, and Rose gave Louis three children. When the third child (my mother) was barely 3 years old, however, Louis too passed away. Rose was left with quite a fortune for those days — perhaps over 8 million dollars. On the advice of a friend, she invested the whole bundle with a financial scoundrel who promptly fled to South America, leaving Rose and her children penniless.

The Great Depression had just set in, and Rose found herself scrubbing public toilets to keep her children housed and fed. She received no mercy from her husband’s family, who actually went to court to dis-inherit them and whatever mongrel offspring had issued from the un-holy union.

Rose’s family was equally remote, and so she began organizing a women’s collective for mutual support. This group expanded over the next few years, eventually becoming the Women’s Benefit Association, and was actually one of the precursors of the modern Women’s Movement.

Rose insisted that all of her children go to college, but when World War II came, her oldest (a son) ended up fighting in Germany. He was stationed there after the war, and when she traveled over to visit him, she was appalled at the conditions the Germans faced in the aftermath of the destruction. She immediately got involved in a kind of “black market” underground charity operation, smuggling foodstuffs and clothing to starving German families.

When her two daughters back in America began their contributions towards the post-war baby boom, she returned to the states to help out. Whenever a new child arrived on the scene, she was there to share with chores and act as a baby-sitter.

When I was about 3 years old, she was escorting me along a park path one morning when a huge dog suddenly bolted through some nearby shrubbery, knocked me down, and stood snarling and drooling over me – its face inches from my own. I was in somewhat of a shock at this until, with a loud Boom!  she whacked the dog over the head with her purse and chased it away. After this incident, I began calling her Boomba, and the name stuck.

Rose was a very spiritual woman, and when I was growing up, she would often call me to her side and share with me her relationship to things Divine. She taught me how she prayed, which involved a widening remembrance – starting with her family, and then expanding out to include each person she had ever met, and finally embracing all of creation – submitted in Love to God’s Grace and Mercy. After that, she would usually enjoy a glass of port wine, and sometimes a cigarette.  

There were five children in my family, and the last to arrive was Mary Rose. I was about 7 years old at the time, and when I returned from school during the first months after my sister came home from the hospital, I would sit quietly with my grandmother while she rocked the baby and hummed little tunes to her.

One afternoon, as I entered the sun room where she sat cradling my sister in her arms, my Grandmother looked up at me and softly said:

“Bobby, our precious little Mary Rose is gone.”

“But Boomba …..” I pointed, “she’s right there.”

No, Bobby – she’s gone to God.”

About 15 years later, my Rose herself had suffered a series of multiple heart attacks. One afternoon, as I visited with her by her bedside, she looked over to me and told me it was time.

“Time for what?” I inquired.

“Time to go to God.” She replied, and then smiled so sweetly at me, closed her gentle eyes, and breathed out into eternity.

I’d been on Earth for a couple of years already, but I have very little memory of the time preceding this day. I seemed to have mostly enjoyed a natural state, blissful, with no abiding sense of separation between a subject (“me”) and objects (“the world”). Timeless, free of habitual reactivity, bright and shining presence — all just conceptual constructs which merely hint at the mystery/rapture of our inherent innocence.

On this day, my mother was changing diapers on my baby sister, whom she had just brought home after birthing at the hospital. To amuse me, she gave me a little cardboard man with a balloon head. I was deeply enchanted, I felt instant love for this odd little being. Suddenly, his head blew up with a loud bang. This initiation created the perfect platform for what was to follow. My mother sat me in a hallway, about 20 feet from where she is standing at the kitchen stove. Suddenly, incredibly – there is a stark and undeniable observation: She is “there”, I am “here”.

A monumental fear grasps me, a shock of terror I had never known. I open my mouth to scream, but I am paralyzed. Now everything seems to solidify, contract, and dim. Instantly, I have realized a profound state of un-enlightenment. I am baptized into separation, duality, and likewise — the longing of a homing heart. A dream journey begins, another unique holographic vehicle for Spirit to recognize and express itself as who and what I am through the cellular formation of this body-being here, this individualized ocean drop.

How amazing – this human birth! So many sad sayers would have us conceive of this human life as a kind of nightmarish hallucination, and no doubt, there are certainly moments when it might appear so. And yet, there are other moments, more vivid than fear’s pale shadow, when we know deep down that it is all good – truly, beyond good, beyond any qualification the intellect could devise. Rather than representing some sort of karmic trap or low-level prison from which we must strive to escape, we can instead appreciate physical embodiment for exactly what it is, graciously allowing this life to live us, without resistance or complaint. Perhaps that is the real meaning of surrender – to let it all be as it is, knowing that it is nothing other than the divine play of the Beautiful One, the same One who is living us now.