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.