42 Mirror

It was incredible yet true—how could this happen—halos, lights, spirits, truths, loves, joys, all true, all true, perfect, all of the most amazing and most unbelievable, most ideal and beautiful stories and rumors and legends and myths of yearning and hope I had ever heard, ever read and they were all true, they had all come true for me. For me! Why me, why me, why had I been chosen to see and to hear and to know in this way? But it seemed now that we would all know. What had I done? What did this mean? What was I supposed to do—

To say?

How was I to proceed?

I had done not doing.

I had stopped cold.

I had shut my mouth.

I had refused to move.

"What is it?" they asked.

Buddha:

It's all suffering.

It's all suffering.

It's all suffering.

It's all suffering.

It's all suffering.

It's all suffering.

Then five hundred years later:

Jesus Christ—

Jesus Christ—

Jesus Christ—

Jesus Christ—

Jesus Christ—

Jesus Christ—

To me, to me!

The Messianic secrets, the Eleusinian mysteries!

People, people everywhere.

Think!

Think!

I read and made notes, put two and two together, stopped separating my sundry lives one from the other, I put myself on the same plane as the masters and rulers, ego be damned and pride, I'd dare to be great, there was only the present and I had finished with criticism, to hell with it, no limitations but those in my own feeble mind.

God!

There was a hell to it, there was a hell to it.

Mind reeled.

Midafternoon on the Saturday before Easter I was the only diner in Lucy's Garden of Eatin. Sitting alone in my booth I felt like I had been dead two thousand years and had just risen from the dead.

Alive!

Just as Jesus would have felt.

Awake!

If things wouldn't add up one way maybe they would another.

It was possible.

Yes—

Crazier things had happened.

The thought entered my head—

I was Jesus!

No—

That was insanity.

Sick—

I had gone mad.

Yes.

I had lost my mind.

Indeed.

I was insane.

Evil.

The thought entered my head—

I was Judas!

No—

Insanity two.

I grieved the loss of my mind.

Jesus.

Crazy.

Judas.

Crazy.

Jesus.

Crazy.

Judas.

Crazy.

I became an insect, an ugly bug.

Cockroach.

Fly.

To my horror I realized

To my horror I realized

Deranged!

I rose.

I walked back down the hill and into my basement.

Dirt.

I took a spot beside the hundred-year-old boiler.

Dust.

I hunkered there on the dust and dirt like Milton's toad.

Squat and sad.

Wart.

I was a demon lost in hell.

Then the Christian paradigm shattered.

Disintegrated.

Pulverized.

Atomized.

Evaporated.

Free!

I was free.

I stood and walked outside to blue sky and white sun.

Life without idea.

I could quit, quit cold, quit flat, stop, look, and listen, so I had, I had—

I had.

I had stopped going through the motions.

I had read and studied holy books and books about holy books.

I had done what John had asked me to do and I had stopped doing what he had said I ought not do anymore.

I had stopped lying.

I had confessed everything.

I had given up secrets, all of my secrets, I had nothing to hide anymore.

I didn't care what anyone else now thought.

Free—

I was finished with them, secrets, lies, promises, excuses, apologies, I didn't want them anymore, I'd had enough of them, I had repudiated them, repudiated secrecy, I wanted no more lies, no more hidden, nothing concealed.

Forever—

I would rather have been dead than have secrets.

Dead!

I did only shine, shine, shine, shine and wait, think, dream, see, know and be silent, watch, look and listen, think, study, remember and wait, be patient and shine, wait and shine.

I was a mirror only and I could only reflect.

I wanted no more.

I was dead and a reflection only.

Dead.

I was an intellectual catastrophe.

I was a ruin.

41 Joy

My god!

I had entered and passed over into another realm.

I tried to lie down and rest but there was only death there.

I tried to meditate but death forced itself upon me.

Death said it was close and that it would not wait for the truth.

Death.

It was truth, it was the only truth, it didn't care about my fears or my anxieties, it didn't care about my reputation or agonies or failures or successes or my future, my job or my pensions, it didn't care what my family thought, the thoughts of my parents, my grandparents, my wife, my children, my friends or associates, it didn't care about their embarrassments, their shames, their guilts, fears, regrets, concerns, reputations, exposures, it didn't care about the government or the law, about lawsuits or judgments or arrests, penalties or enforcements, executions or tortures, death didn't care about anything at all except the truth, and it wouldn't wait for the changes of societies, governments, for the laws to change, for the culture, for the churches to change, for the morals and mores and customs and conventions to change, or for the liberalization of national states or ecclesiastical polity, or for me to gain strength and courage, or for me to grow safer or more secure or to provide for my children or to make the right preparations or to convert or to gather support or gain adherents, followers, apostles, disciples, or to build a church or churches, or to hire a lawyer or a firm of lawyers or to get a law degree or a phd or to strike it rich or for the wheels and astrological signs of the zodiac to turn and arrange themselves in meaningful and fortuitous conjunctions.

Death didn't give a damn about any of those things, death didn't give anything at all, death was just death, and when I was dead my enlightenment and its truth or untruth would be dead with me if I did not express it as it was and shout it and say it and sing it and write it and teach it and draw it and live it and be it.

I didn't want to be dead.

I didn't want that miracle to be dead with me.

I didn't want to maintain that Buddhist silence any longer, I didn't want to be Joyce, to be smart, to be careful, to be shrewd, to be cunning, to plan and to plot and to beware.

I wanted to let it all spill out in torrents and floods of light, oceans of light, the stars swollen to suns, the sky and the heavens white with light, the light opening the dead and darkened eyes, making the flesh transparent, the flesh and bone become form and color, the line and contour still sharp and definite but the beauty and body ideal and free from ignorance, prejudice, and fear, perfect, the white yellow bright golden auras glowing as visible and real as full moons encircling their heads, their eyes glowing white and yellow as fires, their pink and white mouths open in wide beautiful smiles and glorious laughter and joy, joy of fulfillment and realization of salvation, total salvation, of complete union and redemption and joy, yes, joy, joy, I could say it as often as I wanted, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, it was fantastic and extreme, it had all come true and not one beauty had been omitted, not one creature had been left out, not one tragedy nor sickness nor evil yet remained, and all had been made whole, true, beautiful, and good.

The beings I saw were not angels nor air nor spirits nor the substance of dream but the actual living, breathing, thinking, touching beings of flesh and bone I knew and loved, just the people of the real world made spirit and angel by my cleansed and perfect vision and by their own faith and by the oneness of god, and they stepped down the stairs and corridors and halls fully in grace, grouped about one another like families and friends and lovers, and moved towards me, mute me, me in awe, awed, odd, wordless, speechless, understanding.

Understanding all.

Witness.

40 Awe

All day Sunday I prepared myself for Monday, my first day of trying to be totally honest, my first day of truth. I did not sleep well but I awoke full of nervous energy, serious, determined to try my best. I would say only the truth, I had decided, nothing but the truth. Even before I encountered anyone I felt somehow like a different person, as if I were no longer myself, and the world, too, had changed. The actual experience astonished me. Early that morning on my walk to work I met a colleague and he greeted me.

"Hi!" he said. "How are you doing?"

Uh—

I was speechless.

My commitment to be honest had given me new ears. I heard every common amenity and every tired banality and platitude in a new way.

How was I doing?

Hmm.

Now I had no idea how I was doing. The simple everyday question threw me deep down back into myself and into moral and philosophical reflection. My odd silences and puzzled looks were disturbing to my students, to my colleagues, to my old friends and acquaintances.

I thought.

"Are you all right?" they asked.

Hmm.

Was I all right?

I no longer knew the answer to that question either. I thought about it as if it were some mathematical equation that just possibly with enough patience and time I could figure out, "o"—perfection, the circle, the zero, nothing, "k"—imperfection, the intersection, the "q," the "x," the "t," the cross, the swastika, killing, industrial killing, war, death. I felt my lips and mouth form the "o," the root of my tongue on my palate make the "k"—

What were the meanings of these shapes and sounds?

"Hellooo?"

Friends queried me as if I were mentally retarded.

"Hellooo?"

I think some of my associates believed that I had come to work stoned or high on an even more powerful drug, lsd perhaps. They cocked their heads at odd angles in my direction, curious.

These reactions—at once understandable and comical to my silent consideration of their questions and remarks and to my effort, unknown to them, to speak only the truth and nothing but the truth—both astonished and amused me.

I smiled.

I could not help but smile broadly—something woke in me and I grinned.

Ah!

"Good morning!" I said finally.

True.

"Good morning!" they replied smiling, visibly relieved.

True.

So my day went.

I was a stranger in a strange land.

I listened to English like I had never listened before. It sounded like a foreign language that without any study I had mysteriously been granted the power to understand. Yes, but now I understood it only too well, so profoundly that I was often left stunned, mute, amazed, and I could not reply. Three years later at the urging of a friend I read a book by the then popular guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho, in which he stated that the first thing that happens to a man who decides sincerely to be honest and to speak only the truth is that he finds himself speechless because he discovers how little if anything he really knows for sure.

Thought.

Don't know.

Doubt.

Nothing to say.

Silent.

This was my experience.

Me.

I was thirty-two years old and I had experienced many amazing days in my life. I had loved and been loved by beautiful women, I had been twice a father and I dearly loved my children and they loved me, I had been the life of many a party, I had too many times to count been a very happy drunk, I had been stoned and learned to love pot, I had gotten lost on acid, I had experienced the joy of rock and roll music, the high of rocky mountains, the ocean, I had made and loved friends as dear as family, I had even experienced days when all of these delights were given me at once—good friends, close family, beautiful woman, loving children, acid, beer, pot, mountain or ocean, music, health, and fun—but I had never ever known amazement like the amazement I knew on this day; and this amazing day was but the first day of one entire year of amazement and for two hundred days each day more amazing than the last.

Awe.

On this first day I did not tire yet once in bed I slept as I had never slept before and I dreamt as I had never dreamed before. Though I knew I was sleeping I remained a bodiless consciousness and in some mysterious fashion I remained also fully awake and aware.

All that night a lamp burned and a small, yellow, even flame glowed in my dark dream.

39 Wonder

In January the college offered an interim curriculum. For one month faculty taught just a single course and in it we were encouraged to experiment and to explore. In conjunction with my colleague and good friend Paul Johnson, a world history professor who had recently become obsessed with the concepts of archetype and myth, I offered a class I called Integrity 101. My old friend Billy Boyd, whom I had hired to teach English with me just a year or two earlier, was also an eager participant. As required reading I assigned Monday Night Class and A Separate Reality. There were no papers, no tests, no grades. All students had to do was attend. Fifteen students enrolled. We talked—mainly about telling the truth all the time. Was it possible? What might happen? Dare one attempt it?

No one present had ever tried.

Hmm.

Was it a door to another realm?

Wonder.

Our curiosity was contagious.

Inquiry.

Twice John drove from Ames to Reunion to join our discussion and to speak of his experience of Stephen Gaskin and of his knowledge of The Farm and to answer questions. My friend Paul purchased tapes of Gaskin talks and lectures and summarized recent scholarship on myth and archetype. He introduced the ideas of Carl Jung, Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade. Everyone was intrigued by Gaskin and Castaneda. The idea and possibility of telling the truth all the time—a task so simple and yet so daunting—transformed the remote and to most of us the essentially unreal figures of Buddha, Lao Tsu, Socrates, and Jesus into real human beings little different from ourselves. From 9:30 to 11:30 five mornings a week for four weeks we read and wondered and talked.

That winter was especially beautiful.

In Reunion we always got a ton of snow. It began to fall at Thanksgiving, continued on and off through March, and in the bitter cold of northeast Iowa it stayed in spite of the bright January sun. Morning skies were clear and deep blue and I remember as I watched through the windows of my home for arriving students the blanket of blinding and brilliant white snow flashing in electric glints and sparkles in the bright yellow and white light.

My students exhibited such profound yearning!

John, too, felt it.

By the time the interim class ended I had myself decided to tell the truth.

I was wary and yet, except for the private life I had for years kept secret from my wife, I was not a dishonest man. Indeed friends and acquaintances had praised my intellectual honesty and courage. At age twenty-seven I had been elected president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors and upon my return from graduate school in Arizona I had served each year in one office or another of that organization. In the classroom I had earned a reputation for both creativity and academic rigor. I made friends easily and I had many. But in spite of all this I had little respect for honesty and truth as my friend John and his guru Stephen seemed now to understand the concept.

As a student of literature—William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, James Joyce—I had been taught to admire above all the ironist and I was myself an ironist. Irony, I believed, was as close as one could come to truth in this life. When one asserted a thesis, irony pointed simultaneously to its antithesis, to the unstated opposite, and thereby to the whole truth. I was by nature hyperbolic, gregarious, an entertainer, a comedian, a storyteller and raconteur. I liked to make people laugh. For the amusement of my friends and my own I embellished anecdotes and invented tall tales. But these I expected no one to accept as truth.

It was fun.

No more than that.

Truth more than this there was none. So when I determined to tell the truth and nothing but the truth all the time I was not even sure what this meant and I had no idea of what might happen in the endeavor.

I had no expectation whatsoever.

No goal.

I had thought off and on for a long time about it. If it should all go wrong my wife and children, it seemed to me, could not be terribly harmed. They lived among neighbors and friends they had known for years in a small town where few if any residents even locked their cars or the front doors of their homes. At the end of May I would begin a three-month summer vacation, my first full summer off in five years. If for some reason the very worst should happen as a result of this experiment—and I had no idea what that might be—it seemed to me there might be time to repair it and if need be even to heal.

But by this time, thanks to John, I did take the vow to be honest very seriously. The new term began the first Monday of February. Would my telling the truth cost me my job? My doctorate? My career? My marriage? My family? My reputation? My friends? My health? My sanity?

My life?

I did not really know.

Thirty years later I would read in a book—the title of which I've forgotten—by Chan master Sheng Yen of the method of "koan" and "huato." In neither have I had any instruction yet something he said connected. The greater the doubt, explained Sheng Yen, the greater the duration and intensity of the illumination.

Without a teacher had I somehow stumbled upon this mystery?

Yes.

I think so.

Yes.

38 Zen

John fed me books.

Doubts and questions I thought I had long ago laid to rest resurfaced. I drove home to Reunion eager to read and to study my borrowed copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and thought maybe, just maybe, I could figure all of this out.

I didn't sleep.

The scene I will describe next is etched indelibly in my mind.

Our living room was large and spacious. On the hardwood floor there were only a few pieces of colorful carpet. Our minimalist coffee table and couch were the only furniture in the room. The couch sat several feet from the south wall near the top of which were three square windows. The coffee table sat parallel to the couch. On it lay my wallet, my keys, a folder of student papers I planned to grade, a small tray of pencils and pens, a glass of water. I had taken off my shoes—I never wore shoes in the house—and I had propped my feet up on the coffee table. I leaned back against the cushion of the couch, opened the book by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, skipped the introduction by Richard Baker, and began to read. It was not at all what I had expected. A college professor of language and literature, I had never before read English prose like this:

People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.

It was so simple, so lucid, so clean. There seemed to be no motive in it. It was so pure. I could read it only slowly, each sentence more than once, some three times or four or more. I had to stop again and again and think. Its very simplicity made it hard to understand: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."

It took me an hour, maybe two, to read six pages.

It confused me.

In a good way I got lost.

Intrigued.

It was exhilarating.

My initial contact with whatever it was Gaskin and my friend John were preaching had sunk like a stone in the sea of my normal waking consciousness and unknown to me that stone had been a seed which had planted itself deep in the dark soft muddy ocean floor of my unconscious and had pushed down a root and then pushed up the slender stem that had risen slowly and steadily for four years and was now about to surface and to flower.

Dazed, I began page seven:

When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say "inner world" or "outer world," but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no "I," no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.

I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach, the breath knocked out of me, like I'd just found the words to express something I had known my whole life, words that explained the strange moment of magic and mystery in Shenandoah when I was ten and in my wonder of me—my life, the buildings and businesses around me, the streets, the vehicles, the shoppers, the earth, the air, the sun, the sky, all of it, everything, being itself—I had felt suddenly all alone, lost in infinite space, awed, and in my miracle of mind the question had opened.

What is this?

Now this book had stopped me. I felt dizzy. I had to lie down. I swung my feet up onto the couch and lay on my back. I rested the back of my head on the flat cushion of the seat. A race I had been in for thirty-one years had ended. My breath felt easy and cool as it sailed in and out of my nose.

I looked up.

Above my head was a yellow plastic flowerpot hanging by three golden chains from a hook I had screwed into the ceiling. A single bright white blossom bent gently east in the direction of my face. From the south, beams of bright yellow sunshine poured through the high windows and onto the plant as I watched—already stunned by the most moving intellectual experience I'd ever had in my fifteen years of academic life—and as if moved by the tiny intricate wheels and gears of a living and impossible clock in slow motion the entire pot rotated on its golden chains one quarter turn above my head until its glowing flower directly and perfectly faced the sun.

My brain melted.

Mind.

I don't know how long I lay there.

At rest.

When I finally got up I was a different man.

Empty.

When just a few weeks later John sent me the Evans-Wentz translation of The Diamond Sutra and I read that the Buddha had begged his breakfast in the village before he delivered his lesson to the waiting bodhisattvas and arhats I experienced intellectual shortcircuiting. East and West fused, Eliot and Pound I began to understand, even the Joyce I had been taught in graduate school by O'Malley, and though I had studied American literature in English departments my entire life the category itself now disintegrated and then reconstituted as world philosophy. The Diamond Sutra I felt I understood instantly, intuitively, as if it had been written especially for me, just one more epiphany in a concatenation of countless mystical moments by which my conventional mind would be bombed, battered, and blinded over the next twelve months.

I was stunned.

Exuberant.

37 Confession

My wife didn't get along at all well with John. To her he was an unkempt friend of mine who did not support his wife and children at the minimum level—American midwestern middle class normal.

John was always thinking.

John was the one person I knew on earth who believed in figuring everything out—and for this I loved him. He was a true, real American gypsy, nomad, and itinerant who had moved his family from place to place to follow the intellectual scent. His wife, equally generous, carried along their two young children and was devoted to him.

Enlightenment—

Truth—

"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.

In the beginning it meant nothing to me whatsoever. I had no truth to tell anyone. I didn't know any truth. What was truth? Platitudes—or an equation like E equals mc squared? What else could it be?

"What is truth?" I asked John.

"Oh, come on!" John scoffed. "You know what telling the truth means!"

I squirmed.

"Do you tell your wife the truth or not?" he demanded.

"No."

What was I supposed to do?

There was no truth; truth was irony, wit, intelligence, and art—cunning, exile, and silence like Joyce had said. I considered myself an honest person in so far as the word honest had any precise meaning to me whatsoever. I had never killed anyone nor tried to—though I had been involved in several abortions—and I had few if any hatreds and certainly no enduring ones. I had rarely struck another human being except in ignorance or in jest and even then I had caused no serious hurt or injury so far as I knew, and even those incidents possibly more severe than I had acknowledged to myself I had long ago come to regret and repudiate. I thought of myself as an innocent, to tell you the truth, and did not even take seriously my eleven infidelities in fourteen years of marriage nor the cannabis I had smoked for eight. I had tried lsd perhaps fifteen times, a novelty I had no interest in continuing. I loved my wife, in spite of my lies and the secrets I'd kept from her, and now finally we had come to a better understanding, I thought, about both our marriage and our future.

I confessed.

In 1973, at the conclusion of the last affair I would ever have, due to John's influence I told my wife about it, I confessed my years of infidelity, and I asked for my wife's forgiveness. I wanted to be a good husband, I told her, different from the man I had been for fourteen years.

I meant it.

I did.

Leigh had forgiven me.

I loved her.

I did.

Grateful for her reaction, glad, and inspired, I determined to do more. I was a flawed, sinning, funloving liar of quite ordinary proportions and I was about ready to settle down gradually and, I hoped, comfortably into the learned and vulgar routines of the academics and scholars with whom I had studied and worked and played for most of my life.

Things looked good.

Real good.

I was up on life.

High.

I was happy and pleased with myself and with what I had done and become and was becoming. I had no illusions about life. I had seen what it was all about. I was glad to have escaped the worst of it. I thanked my lucky stars that I had avoided Vietnam. That had been the fork in the road for the men of my generation. I was smart, I thought, and I was glad I was smart. I had lots of good grades, proof that I was intelligent, good credentials. Friends seemed to find me bright and fun to be around. They consulted me and asked for my advice on difficult personal predicaments in their own lives. I had no real problems. Nothing really serious was bothering me. It looked all downhill from here on out.

On went the war.

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36 Enlightenment

Enlightenment.

That was what he was seeking, John explained, and he could no longer see any reason for seeking anything else, no matter what, so he was going to be as honest as he could. The truth was everything, John said, so as best as he was able John was going to try to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, without exception.

Huh?

There was no truth.

The truth was the belief of fanatics.

Truth was subjective, relative, complex, ironic, incommunicable, ambivalent, ambiguous, beyond the grasp of human being, it was a mirage, an illusion, a delusion, indeed it was nothing at all, and outside of mathematics and the hard sciences—and maybe even there, too—any pursuit of truth led to inhumanity and to the creation and tyranny of cruel monsters and insane madmen like Hitler and Stalin. In my interpretations of literature, if necessary I had manufactured truths congruent with the preconceptions, biases, and prejudices of teachers, instructors, professors, nonteaching educators, members of boards and committees, in short all those constituencies essential to my own academic success.

I was good at this.

At eighteen I had registered for the draft. Had I been called I would have gone. I knew no alternative. Even to consider opposition then seemed impossible. By twenty-eight I had become liberal, pacifistic, and sympathetic to the ideals of a nonviolent communism—were such a thing even possible—but I had never myself seriously considered a revolutionary act and would have been embarrassed and frightened by any suggestion that I should. John was my best and oldest friend from college. He had been the first in my clique to smoke marijuana, to oppose the war in Vietnam, and to promote the theories of Karl Marx.

I considered John super-intelligent, a genius even.

But enlightenment?

I was attracted to Gaskin's point of view on both sex and drugs. Married couples married other couples and became four-marriages, six-marriages, eight-marriages, and open marriages to boot—proverbial free love, essentially, so long as it was all consensual and honest—and pot, too, marijuana, was not simply smoked and condoned, no, it was much more than that, a sacrament, in fact, like the bread and wine of Christianity.

These gifts of "enlightenment" I liked a lot.

In this commune, this monastery, it sounded like if I were just open and honest about it all I would be able to get stoned, to fuck more than one woman, and still be not only a monk but a bodhisattva and maybe even a saint.

John came on very strong, intensely, earnestly honest and pious and moral, and yet he maintained his remarkable sense of humor, his irony, his friendliness, he laughed and joked easily and often, and all this was persuasive, sincere. But he was going to do, he said, only what was right.

Religion.

No.

Not what I wanted.

At all.

35 Discontent

After John told me that he was seeking enlightenment and that he did not want anything else but enlightenment and only enlightenment, I began myself to reconsider the entire idea and it began to make some slight sense in my head, and I became restless with intellectual excitement and with a strange kind of fear about my wasted, selfish past, and I found it hard to concentrate or completely to relax, so I was often pacing about the house in circles or thumbing idly through my index of names and telephone numbers not knowing exactly whom or what I wanted to call or why or what I might ask or say, but it seemed as if I should connect to someone or something in some psychic, mystic way about some deep, unconscious holy alliance which had been alive and growing for centuries, even millennia, while I slept.

My normal entertainments and activities became dully unsatisfying, and now I felt also vaguely unfulfilled with teaching, reading, sports, conversation, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, dining out with casual friends in pleasant restaurants, with new possessions and objects, with cars, clothes, wines, furnishings, with jokes, and with the predictable stories among acquaintances of awards, jobs, firings or potential firings, promotions, pregnancies, divorces, affairs, and even with sexual flirtations and fantasies. For the first time in my life I felt vaguely unhappy and I knew not why nor how this unhappiness had come to be, for in the past I had been always inwardly exuberant and self-loving and secretly thrilled with the everyday risks, chances, betrayals, threats, and desires of ordinary life. I felt, too, that I was a good person, acceptably moral and proper given the degree of repression, dishonesty, and hypocrisy taken for granted as a matter of course not just in academic life but also in normal, middle-class American suburban living.

I had been making progress.

I was straight-A in course work for my Ph.D. in English. I had passed the twenty-four hours of comprehensive written examinations and had also passed, with one embarrassing dissenting vote, the bizarre, surreal oral examination over the period of my specialization in American literature before which two members of my Ph.D. committee had first misled me and then asked questions of me about writers and periods they had stated I needed not review. Then I'd had approved by my advisor and the chairman of my committee the first three chapters of my doctoral dissertation on Herman Melville.

This done, I had packed my bags and gone home to the school I left two years before. I was a popular, resourceful professor, still young, and I had gone back to graduate school when I was awarded a year's pay by the institution I had served for three years. In graduate school, where my seminar papers were read and admired, my professors regularly enjoined me to publish. They praised my mastery of the conventions of academic discourse and my skeptical and ironic wit. I was expert at the prevailing academic method, which was to demonstrate and to prove, supposedly, some truth of philosophy, psychology, or literature by adducing lines and words from the text and from other, secondary exposition, all of this termed "evidence" by the scholars of the humanities and the arts, themselves locked in a vicious economic death struggle with scientists whose proofs were mathematical and practical and produced wealth and merchandise or intimidated and controlled or destroyed enemies. These key passages, lines, and words were mined from stories and poems and then set between quotation marks like precious stones, gems of evidence, like "that" and like "this," in the English prose I generated according to my professors' critical formulae. I seemed assured of a tenured, permanent, well-paying job in a private liberal arts college; or should I wish eventually to move to a large state university—and at that time I did not—yes, that, too, seemed possible. My two children were healthy and athletic, intelligent, and optimistic. My marriage was a comfortable compromise.

My life and career seemed set.

I had accepted the grim, meaningless busywork of American education, the greed and the power of academic competition; after all, I had succeeded at it, I had won and had been rewarded for my intelligence and for my wit, I was smart and good with words, shrewd, voluble, articulate, sarcastic, and I could win again.

I had embraced the lies and denials of society. These were to be deplored and lamented in the abstract and their antonyms, the hopeless ideals, rediscovered within unread classics, brought again, shining, to the light of professional scholarship, and reaffirmed. By the conventional American standard I had led a dissolute life but I was no real rebel.

34 Truth

Gaskin's creed—and therefore John's—was not purely Buddhism, I gradually learned, so much as it was an eclectic Buddhist-based blend of many world religions and philosophies. But Gaskin did teach nonviolence, honesty, and service to all humankind—what I later understood as a kind of broad Mahayana Buddhism. John's tales and anecdotes of the weird, his references to moral magic, his odd books and unusual experiences, his quitting his job to follow "the path," his insistence upon openness and total honesty all the time without exception and—yes—his commitment to a life of moral rectitude and integrity had stirred my discontent. Though he had never been wealthy and most considered him poor, John and his wife had always been unusually generous, and half a dozen times they had invited needy acquaintances to move in with them free of charge until they could find work and stand on their own two feet again. By contrast I myself had quite a lot—two college degrees and nearly a third, a good job in a respected profession, and promising prospects for the future. But I also shared many if not most of the failings of other men like myself, young college professors in the soft sciences, arts, and humanities. I drank to excess, I smoked pot, and I cheated on my wife, all three of which I considered vices so minor I thought them hardly vices at all.

The third was my only real secret.

Without an inkling of its irony, I thought of myself as an honest, likeable man. But now—no thanks to John—I had my doubts. Like me, John drank beer and smoked grass, and he had not condemned me for my infidelity, but now he said, yes, he did disapprove of it. Until this infatuation with Gaskin, John had never questioned—to my face at least—my chronic sexual misconduct.

But now there was this peculiar and powerful business of honesty.

Truth.

33 Prayer

When my mother was fifteen years old, she contracted spinal meningitis. Her temperature rose nine degrees higher than normal and she nearly died. Her doctors seemed helpless. Every day and night, my mother told me, her parents knelt beside her bed and prayed to God for her life and indeed she did recover and live; but as a result of her terrible illness my mother lost her hearing and for the rest of her life she was totally deaf.

"Her fever blew that fuse in her brain," my father would explain.

"Oh."

Both my mother and her father attributed her survival at least in part to God and to the power of prayer and I know this experience is an important factor in my mother's own religious faith.

Much more important to my own understanding of life in this universe is another story my mother told me of her own and her family's acceptance of and adjustment to the loss of her hearing in the aftermath of their ordeal. When except for her being deaf my mother had fully recovered and was well, her father gathered the family together for a meeting.

They were not going to be bitter, her father told them, they were not going to blame God, they were not going to blame the doctors, they were not going to blame themselves, they were not going to be resentful, they were not going to be discouraged, they were not even going to be sad.

"It's over and done with," her father told the family. "We're going to put it behind us and go forward."

"It was so smart of him to say that," my mother told me. "I was so grateful."

I understood.

"His attitude helped me so much."

Yes.

It has helped me, too, many times.

Forward.

The hardest I ever prayed was when Leigh got pregnant our senior year of high school. From the day Leigh told me she'd missed her second period and was sure now that she was pregnant until the day three weeks later when I somehow found the courage to tell my father, the first thing I did every morning the moment I woke up was to hang my head over the edge of my bed and gag with the dry heaves. For three weeks every night in bed before I turned and tossed and struggled for hours to fall asleep I prayed like a fucking fiend.

"Jesus! Please! God! No!"

Once I was away from my parents and out on my own I never went back to Church. By my sophomore year of college I no longer called myself Christian. To make a long story short I'll say just that I didn't believe Jesus was a god. Neither did I nor would I ever believe in—let alone worship—a god who judged, punished, and even tortured people simply because of what they did or did not believe.

Yet I was more than familiar with the central stories of what Christians pejoratively call the Old Testament and of course with the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and with his teachings, and my childhood education in these matters paid considerable intellectual dividends in my analyses and interpretations of literature at Iowa State, Indiana, and Arizona State universities.

For me then as for most Americans even now the word "religion" meant Judaism maybe and Christianity mainly if not only. Though I did respect the role that religion played in the protests and nonviolence of Gandhi and King, I did not really understand it; and by 1974 I believed that religion of any kind—Christianity in particular—was long behind me. Except as an interesting superstition, a curiosity of intellectual history, and a necessary instrument of literary exegesis I considered religion both meaningless and stupid.

Little did I know.