79 Fun

I continued to sit for an hour or two every day and to exchange emails with Billy and John, both of whom encouraged me. In the books and articles I read some meditators described agonizing emotional knots that arose during their meditation. They suffered failure, resentment, loathing, guilt, remorse, regret. I had experienced nothing at all like that. If an hour of meditation seemed easy to me, I wondered, was I doing something wrong?

The conflicts others described I had resolved.

Parent.

Job.

Relationship.

God.

Long before he died, my father and I had forgiven each other and reconciled. I loved my mother. My marriage was solid. I was on good terms with my family. I had survived ten reorganizations at the college, my job was secure, and I liked my work. Yet at the same time my meditation, my daily readings on Buddhism, and my thinking had for some reason churned up in me a lot of vague inner turmoil. Now I felt almost obsessed; and all summer long John and Billy were constantly on my mind. I knew I was a bother.

I apologized.

"Yet I need still more," I explained.

More.

I wondered if Billy and his wife Ginny, also a student of the Trungpa and Mipham Rinpoches, were in training to become priests.

I asked.

Billy explained that they were yogi householders. To become a lama, he said, required in addition to many other things a three-year monastic retreat; and though he was interested in doing a three-year retreat Billy didn't really see how he could possibly manage it without just giving everything away.

Ah!

There's the rub.

Yes.

John had spent eight years at The Farm. There the idea of cooperative effort in harmonious communal living—ordinary daily life, not monastic retreat—was the one thing Stephen Gaskin perhaps got right, John thought, with no separation between the realms of the spiritual and the mundane; and yet without the devotion of monastic adherents, John acknowledged, we would have lost valuable scriptures, the rituals, and the practices.

It was confusing.

Very.

Even prayer I reconsidered.

Wiesel:

Moche the Beadle explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers only within yourself…. I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

But in the power of even such a wise prayer I could not believe.

With all gods I felt finished.

Enough.

John felt the same about gurus.

"I despise the whole New Age spirituality marketplace and all the glossy ads for gurus and shamans and lamas and Zen masters and centers and retreats," John wrote, "and the San Francisco Bay area is ground zero for all of that crap."

At this point in my life I was interested neither in joining a commune nor in becoming a monk. I was fifty-eight years old, I had been married for twenty-five years to a woman I loved, I had raised four children, I owned my own home, one morning a week I babysat my grandson Dylan, his new baby sister Katy was only a month old, and I liked my job.

It was in fact in the classroom teaching English that I felt most awake. My classes got deep in a hurry and, as I told Billy and John, it was there that I felt I had to be awake, totally alert, at the top of my game every day, and I believed—to be immodest—that I really was. I made many mistakes, of course, and because my classes got so deep so fast it did sometimes seem that I was always on the brink of trouble. Classroom teaching was fun, really fun, both fun and real, and a strangely scary kind of fun, way out there on the cosmic ocean of mind, and when I was engaged in it, I told my two friends, there was no place I would rather be. In my classes I felt more present and more attentive to the present than anywhere else. For the full two hours of a class I had almost no inner discursive voice at all. Both Billy and John had read the short stories I had written of teaching.

They knew what I meant.

"In class I am all right there," I explained. "I wonder why that is."

Billy earned his living as an English teacher, too, though he was less content with it than I. But he said he loved the descriptions John and I provided of our experiences in meditation. At his Buddhist temple in Austin, Texas, Billy was himself a meditation instructor.

"Either both of you are on the right track," Billy told me and John, "or we are off all three of us."

Forward.