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.