72 Vajra

 

John joined our conversation.

John stated again his disillusionment with teachers and he briefly described his recent acceptance of God and his practice of prayer. The Farm had had no prayer, John said, nor had the San Francisco Zen Center. John had learned to pray in the Native American Church.

It was important to him.

"It is something I rely on," John wrote. "I speak to the Creator and He speaks to me. He loves me and comforts me and guides me. If I ask, He answers. There you have it—I've become a prayer person."

Whoa!

I had known John for almost forty years. He had been raised an atheist. I had never heard him speak of a god in this way nor had I imagined he ever would. John praying to a god—

Unbelievable!

To Billy and to me, both of us raised by conservative Christian parents, this concept of god seemed childish and, though we tried our hardest to be patient and kind, from a man as intelligent as John we could not disguise our condescension. In Buddhism, Billy wrote, deity is real but it is also a projection of mind, impermanent, not ultimately real, and deity cannot save us.

"We have to do that ourselves," he said.

For him, Billy explained, Vajrayana Buddhism was on one level a separate reality more vast than anything Carlos Castaneda had ever imagined; and to enter it, Billy added, required a tremendous leap into the mandala of sacred world.

"It's mind-blowing!" he exclaimed.

Hmm.

By this, too, I was confused.

Was I missing something? I'd had my mind blown. Need it be blown again? I had been shown the infinity of mind and universe. Was there a reality greater than that? Billy's remarks had stirred me in a way I did not like. They had provoked me—made me wonder again if there was something I should want when for many years now I had felt like I was pretty much all done with any serious wanting. After first telling me what I thought I already knew well—that the object was not exalted mental states and experiences and that indeed there was in fact no object even to practice—Billy had then pointed, it seemed to me, to exactly such an experience in what he called the sacred world. In his book Secret of the Vajra World Reginald Ray cites this passage by Milarepa:

When men of the world, having found one-tenth of an ounce of gold, rejoice over it and then lose it, they despair. But that cannot be compared to dying without having attained Enlightenment. For a life which leads to Enlightenment is more precious than a billion worlds filled with gold.

Jesus!

I had spent twenty-five years struggling to regain some sense of the normal and ordinary. I did not want another "enlightenment" or whatever it had been. I'd had enough. I wanted only to work hard each day for peace—in me and in the world. I had long ago abandoned any hope in political schemes and I had surrendered, too, any hope that a nonviolent commune like The Farm might ever inspire others, grow, multiply, and gain broad appeal.

Even John had given up on that.

"I keep expecting The Farm to take off!" I had told John once when he lived there.

John had laughed.

"Yes," John said, "for years everybody on The Farm has been expecting it to take off."