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.
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