26 John

Though ultimately I failed to finish my dissertation and thus failed also to earn my degree, it was during those two years in the desert that I made my first real contact with what I learned only later had been a form of Buddhism.

John Ward, now a computer programmer and part-time hippy in San Francisco and my best friend since we'd both been freshmen in an honors English class at Iowa State in Ames, had been attending something he called Monday Night Class, a weekly assembly of students, hippies, drug addicts, potheads, draft evaders, pacifists, truants, runaways, and street people, odd seekers of all kinds, the discussion moderated by a man named Stephen Gaskin.

When I visited John and his wife Susan and their two children for a week in San Francisco, John clearly had fallen under Gaskin's spell. His teaching was all John talked about.

It was all about doing what was right and only what was right.

Being good.

The mission, John informed me without a trace of irony, was to save the world. As I understood the teaching, this meant, first, nonviolence; second, honesty; and, third, compassion.

Since by now I was already committed personally to pacifism and nonviolence—though I had so far been not especially public or vocal about it—and had been so committed for eight years, it was the intensity of John's commitment to the principle of honesty that most impressed me.

There was to be no exception.

None.

"We believe we should tell the truth all the time," John told me.

John looked straight into my eyes as we talked; and this gesture, I quickly learned, always accompanied the teaching. A wavering gaze—to blink or to look away—either in others or in oneself was considered an indication of weakness, avoidance, evasion, insincerity, or dishonesty. In our conversations and debates this meeting and locking of our eyes reminded me of the stare down contests I held with my little brother when we were children.

It was true—for me at least—that someone staring continuously into my eyes as we talked pulled up or seemed to pull up from deep within me insecurities and vague anxieties and fears. It did indeed make me feel as if John and his acquaintances—all students of the teacher they called simply Stephen—were able to see the real me through the windows of my soul.

I felt vulnerable and exposed.

Naked.

Though I had always looked people in the eye when I spoke with them, now, connected to this assessment of truth and untruth, looking people in the eye seemed to possess a profound and mysterious new power of which I had been previously unaware. By nature an open, unafraid, and honest individual among my many male friends, I adjusted quickly to this new convention and expectation of the local social environment and, though it continued to make once normal conversation unusually intense, in a few hours I no longer experienced any serious discomfort. John introduced me to his friends, and my meeting several more students and disciples of Stephen, themselves equally committed to this policy and practice of complete honesty, soon transformed what I had formerly understood and had enjoyed merely as honest, candid, casual conversation into religion.

Inquiry resembled inquisition, reply confession.

Mysticism.

I was a professor of English working toward my third college degree and I had never in my life experienced language and reason used together like this. Sometimes stated explicitly but at other times not, at the base of every conversation there lay like its fundamental moral premise the sole question to be answered. It seemed to possess an occult power.

"What are we supposed to do?"

This question answered, one was expected to do it. The question had invariably a moral and ethical intent though the specific doing might refer to a deed in the immediate present, the next day, in the next week, in the next ten years, or every day for the rest of one's life. Only years later would I learn that the question was in one sense rhetorical since Gaskin and my friend John and his friends had already committed themselves to what Buddhists call the three pure precepts.

What are we supposed to do?

We are supposed to—

Do no harm.

Do good.

Save all beings.

I had planned to visit for a week but I stayed only three days. For ten years I had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day and—thanks to the influence of Stephen and Monday Night Class—John had recently quit. For several weeks now, I learned, he had demanded that his wife quit, too. Each day of my visit I witnessed lengthy debates on the subject, arguments and quarrels, and on several occasions when John seemed to me to bully his wife eventually I had joined in her defense. On the third day I, too, had been issued an ultimatum. I could stay with him, John told me, for the remaining four days of my visit only if I did not smoke. At that time this was all way too much for me—total honesty, stare down contests, and now I was forbidden to smoke. John and I parted still friends, but I flew back to Phoenix on the next available flight. Back at home I wrote John a long letter in which I described what I had observed during my visit and I criticized what I considered his dictatorial and unjust treatment of his wife.

"You demand that she obey you!" I said.

No.

"Not true," John responded.

No.

In nineteen single-spaced handwritten pages of stationery John replied point by point by point to each of my allegations and as a part of each rebuttal John also explained its larger moral and philosophical context. His argument was articulate, logical, calm. Legal testimony, personal observation, religious zeal, academic argument, and even friendly effort to explain, it was both a fantastic manifestation of John's patient commitment to truth and—it also appeared to me at the time—insane. I had been a student and teacher of language and literature for eight years and I had never read anything like it.   

"My wife is not required to stop smoking only because I demand that she obey me," John wrote. "She is required to stop smoking because the two of us together have agreed that we will always try to do only what is honest and right and good and that what is honest and right and good not just for the both for us but also for the world is that we not smoke."

Sheesh.