32 Sin

Neither my mother nor my father cussed and I didn't either until the summer before junior high when I heard others cuss and I grew curious. Did God really take an interest in this matter? If I cussed, would God punish me? Might I die? I had to know for sure and like a scientist I determined to give it a try. I would experiment. Twelve years old, walking alone one Saturday afternoon on Church Street in Shenandoah, I mustered my courage and right out loud I uttered the very worst words I could imagine.

"Jesus fuck shit."

Oo—

It was spooky.

I cringed and I may literally have ducked. That's how I remember the moment. I had scared myself. For half a block I walked warily and looked behind me left and right for any sign of danger and divine retribution.

Nothing.

Just a few weeks later I showed off for my friends at summer church camp. It was our mid-morning rest period and the eleven boys who shared my cabin were all lying in their bunks talking quietly among themselves of the competitive sports and games we played.

"Jesus fuck shit!" out of the blue I announced.

Whoa—

The boys were astounded, shocked, instantly silent.

Hushed.

I waited.

"I'm going to pray for you, Robert!" finally my friend Willy whispered.

Nervous I laughed.

"I am, too!" another boy said and then a third.

"Yes!"

"I can't believe you said that!" Willy exclaimed.

"Ha."

Uneasy I laughed again.

Hm.

I watched as the boys folded their hands and bowed their heads at their beds and moved their lips to their silent prayers. Their belief frightened me and I grew even more nervous. Concerned, just as before, for several minutes I looked around for heavenly warnings and threats, startled and alarmed by every unexpected noise and sudden movement. Fearful, I apologized silently in my head to God and to Jesus and also silently recited the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer and I waited.

Nothing.

That week I cussed no more.

Months passed.

The Wednesday evening before my confirmation on the coming Sunday my three classmates and I sat on high stools in the basement of the church where we were interrogated by the Reverend Lack—his real name—in front of the deacons.

It was our final examination.

I passed.

But following our inquisition the Reverend Lack pulled me aside to speak with me in private before I rejoined my father to go home.

"Why didn't you answer as we practiced?" he asked.

"What?"

I didn't understand.

"Didn't you realize that was the point of the confirmation classes?" he asked.

"No."

I didn't.

He was dumbfounded.

"You were supposed to answer as we practiced!"

"Oh."

I'd had no idea there were right and wrong answers to the questions the minister asked me. For some reason—who knows why—it had never occurred to me that our confirmation classes were a rehearsal. I have no memory at all of either the questions or my answers and I wish I did. I'd love to know what I said I believed back then—but I don't know how I responded.

Months of instruction and I had missed the whole point!

I just said what I thought.

Wait—

There's more.

Required as a boy to be an acolyte, I had one Sunday morning before the service wet my pants in the sacristy, soaking my black robe, yet I performed the ritual lighting of the candles at the altar, sat throughout the service beside the Reverend Lack, and snuffed the flames of the candles during the Benediction without anyone knowing my secret until uncomfortable, ignominious, and ashamed after the service I told my mother. I had been too scared to cross the sacred stage and pass before the congregation to the door to the basement stairs and to the only toilet in the church. Everyone would have known where I was headed and why.

I was twelve, shy, humiliated by my ignorance and fear of intimate acts.

Religion.

31 God

My parents were Lutheran, and growing up I do not remember ever hearing of Buddhism, not even in high school, although I suppose the word must have been listed with the names of the other world religions in a paragraph or three of my world history book. Not even in college did it ring a bell. By then I had become a skeptic, an agnostic, and an atheist, in that order, and although the word Buddhism appeared in the introductions and footnotes to the literature I was required to read and to study—the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the prose of Joseph Conrad, Hermann Hesse, and J.D. Salinger, for example—I paid it no serious attention.

My father had been raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons, until he married my mother. Her family and she were Lutheran, and my dad had become a Lutheran to please his wife. I was baptized Lutheran and until I graduated from high school I was required by my parents every Sunday to attend both Sunday School and Church. Unlike some local Christian churches, the Lutherans in Emerson and Shenandoah, Iowa, where I grew up, did not emphasize the terrible unending tortures and torments of Hell nor the eternal happiness and bliss of Heaven. Common decency and a bland social respectability seemed to be the virtues we were expected to emulate. Lutheran Christianity was also very child-friendly. Both God and Jesus were portrayed as wise men who loved children above all. Every day and especially at Christmas and Easter the Lutheran emphasis was upon making and keeping the children happy. How glad the smallest of them sounded when at Sunday School in the church basement the toddlers with gusto sang just as I once had.

Jesus loves me—this I know

For the bible tells me so

Little ones to him belong

They are weak but he is strong

Yes, Jesus loves me—

Yes, Jesus loves me—

Yes, Jesus loves me—

The bible tells me so

But as I grew older I began to develop a mind of my own. I no longer enjoyed Sunday School and certainly not Church. I hated going to Church. To me it seemed irrelevant and boring beyond belief. Despite my infant Baptism, weekly Sunday School and Church, Bible School, prayers before meals and bed, Luther League, classes in Confirmation, and more, Christianity did not touch me deeply. Though I memorized the Ten Commandments and then all the books of the Bible and every Sunday recited the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed and one Sunday a month participated in Holy Communion, I did not ever truly believe.

I don't know why.

30 Castaneda

John also recommended A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda. To it, too, I was immediately hooked. In this book a Yaqui Indian sorcerer and shaman from northwestern Mexico makes the author his apprentice. An anthropologist studying psychotropic plants for his doctorate, Carlos is gradually initiated by his teacher don Juan Matus into a whole new way of seeing and understanding reality. What seems certain to Carlos and a simple matter of common sense is, Juan demonstrates, only his subjective interpretation of his experience. Carlos must learn, his teacher tells him, to see in a different way. At the beginning of his tutorial Carlos rejects the idea.

He scoffs.

"You make it sound stupid," Juan tells him. "The way I see it, you want to cling to your arguments, despite the fact that they bring nothing to you; you want to remain the same even at the cost of your well-being."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Carlos replies.

Denial—

"I am talking about the fact that you're not complete," Juan insists.

Deficient.

"You have no peace."

This statement annoys Carlos.

He is offended.

He believes that Juan is qualified to judge neither his acts nor his personality.

"You're plagued with problems," Juan tells Carlos.

Unhappy.

"Why?" Juan asks.

"I am only a man," Carlos protests.

No.

Now it is Juan who scoffs.

When things seem unclear, he explains later to his apprentice, we must remember the inescapable fact of our mortality. We will die—and only the idea of death can temper our spirit. For himself, Juan says, nothing matters. His acts, he states, are a controlled folly.

Carlos grows still more confused.

Lost.

He should think often of his inevitable death?

Why—

Controlled folly?

Huh—

Nothing matters?

"Detach yourself from everything," his teacher orders.

Let go.

When Juan was seven years old, for no reason Mexican soldiers killed his mother. When he would not let go of her body, the soldiers broke his fingers so that he could not grasp her any longer.

Then the soldiers killed his father.

Yet—

"I don't hate anyone," Juan tells Carlos.

Juan has learned, he says, that the countless paths of life are all equal, that oppresssors and oppressed meet at the end, and that for both alike life is altogether too short. Only this truth, Juan says, prevails. As long as a man thinks that he is a victim, Juan explains to Carlos, his life will be hell.

"What makes us unhappy is to want."

If we learn to reduce our wants to nothing, Juan adds, then the smallest thing we get will be a precious gift.

"Life is hard," Juan says, "and for a child it is sometimes horror itself."

But nothing matters.

"In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior," Juan explains to Carlos, "and not a whimpering child."

One must learn to see.

"We are men," Juan explains, "and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds."

"Are there any new worlds for us really?" Carlos asks only half in jest.

"We have exhausted nothing, you fool!" Juan responds.

Immediately I read the next book in the series, Journey to Ixtlan, and devoured the third, Tales of Power, when it was published, then went back and read the one I had missed, the first of the series, The Teachings of Don Juan. Nonattachment, the fact of mortality and impermanence, courage, honesty, truth, first in Stephen Gaskin and now again in Carlos Castaneda and in his Indian shaman don Juan Matus.

What on earth was all this?

Then John loaned me his hardcover copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by the Soto Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. Stephen Gaskin, I had learned from his own book and from John, had been a sometime student of Zen and of Suzuki at the San Francisco Zen Center. John and I talked as I thumbed the pages of the slim book in my hands. John explained words and concepts I had only recently encountered—Theravada, Hinayana, Mahayana, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and more. I was at first intrigued, then fascinated, finally obsessed. It was then—in reading Monday Night Class and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind—that I began first to realize and then to understand that in his commitment to nonviolence, to honesty and to telling the truth, to right livelihood, and to other philosophical and ethical principles too numerous to detail John had been practicing Buddhism.

29 Lie

I had only one lie, one secret, and that was my serial infidelity, and even that I kept secret only from my family. My friends knew all about that side of me, I made no secret of it, indeed I told them stories of my desires, my conquests, and my failures, and for that attitude of mine more than one friend had praised me and called me honest. Many of my male friends and colleagues behaved just as I did or they confessed that they wanted to and wished that somehow they could. It was the way of our world, it appeared to me, and among my circle of men friends John was the only exception. Never had John been unfaithful to his wife, he told me, not ever. It was not necessarily the sex to which he objected, he explained, but to the lies and secrets that illicit sex required. In the twelve years of our friendship John had never expressed any disapproval of my sexual conduct but now for the first time he did. John still considered me his good friend, he explained, but it was important now, he said, that I know he disapproved.

Reprimand.

Rebuke.

I call this poem "Riddle."

Compelled to be a good son, I am a cruel brother.

I am a cruel friend.

Compelled to be a good father, I am a cruel husband.

Loveless, I love my mother.

I love friends.

Made wonderful friends, I desire lovers.

Presto! Twelve desire sends.

Beautiful, loving, and young, they fuck me.

I can't say no.

I am a God-damned fucking so and so.

Who am I?

It was an important moment in my life.

The truth.

28 Gaskin

In mid-July of 1972 I returned to Friend in Reunion where I taught English and was appointed chairman of the department. For the next two years I visited John in Ames several times a year and we corresponded frequently by mail. As best he could, John was practicing the principles of Gaskin and The Farm. John's letters were filled with speculation about world religion, philosophy, and enlightenment. To me the word "enlightenment" meant only the period of European intellectual history between Isaac Newton and Maximilien Robespierre.

That's all I knew.

I had only a dim understanding and no more of the psychomystical event called "enlightenment" in eastern religion. I considered it an oriental superstition. It meant nothing to me. Nirvana I thought was another word for heaven and—like heaven—available only after death. But now enlightenment seemed to be all that John was interested in. His letters were full of it. Gaskin, I was told, had experienced enlightenment.

He was in fact "enlightened."

Yes.

Gaskin himself had said so.

Hm.

In his calls and letters John related the event as he said Gaskin described it.

In the version I remember best Gaskin had been wandering lost in total darkness, John said, until he noticed two tiny pinpoints of bright light like distant stars and warily approached them. Up close they were holes that matched and fit perfectly his own eyes and as if trying on a mask he peered into them. From inside a vast sphere a thousand eyes met his own in one instant of simultaneity:

Awake!

This piqued my curiosity.

"Enlightenment is all I want," John wrote me. "I don't want anything else."

John was no fool.

John was one of the most intelligent persons I had ever met and one of the wittiest and funniest. His was a sharp, quick, brilliant mind, and invariably his speculations on enlightenment and truth John balanced with both ingratiating self-effacement and a sharp and amusing irony. Yet, nevertheless, about enlightenment he was absolutely serious. Truth was all. John was committed still to telling the truth all the time. He also sent me news of The Farm. At a visit to his tiny hovel in Ames in the fall of 1974 I read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin from cover to cover in a single sitting, unable to put it down until I had finished.

"Telling the truth is not easy," Gaskin wrote. "It's easier than the alternative, but it's not easy."

For many people the commitment to truth and their practice of it, Gaskin explained in his book, started or stopped depending on what he called the social difficulty of the truth. You had to become unattached to the whole universe, Gaskin said, so that you really did not care, and at that point you would be unattached even to yourself so that one mind at a time you could change the universe.

"But it means you have got to let go of everything," he explained. "You have got to let go of caring who you are."

This, Gaskin more than implied, he himself had accomplished.

He had let go.

"I am not going to hide anything," Gaskin promised.

Nothing.

"You can look into my head and see everything there is to see."

Everything.

All.

Gaskin would look into you that way, too, he explained, and when both you and he were open and unattached then the two of you would become as one. When you did that, really did it, then—bang—you experienced mystic fusion, the mind's connection to all minds, to big mind, and, yes, if you preferred, to god, and this awakening to awareness and consciousness was enlightenment and realization.

Illumination.

"It comes down absolutely convincing to you, in your terms, answering the questions that you have asked all your life, and giving you every wish that you have ever had, you see, and that is how you know when you see it," Gaskin explained, "you know it because it is your childhood dreams."

But he had nothing to boast about, Gaskin said.

Nothing.

"What came on to me came from God," he wrote, "and I'm just really happy that it came on to me. It answered all my wishes, all my childhood dreams, it gave me everything I wanted."

Everything.

"I lack for nothing," he said. "I lack for nothing at all."

Nothing.

This experience, it seemed, Gaskin credited mainly to telling the truth. Though there were many doors to enlightenment and to god, he explained, he himself had one day simply decided to try to tell the truth always and to aspire always to be honest, and it had been that aspiration, vow, and practice that had opened for him the door to god. Others, too, could pass through, he insisted, and all that was necessary was for them to decide that in fact they did indeed want to do it and for them to start working at it.

"You can change your mind and decide right now to tell the truth," Gaskin wrote.

Hmm.

"Anybody can."

Hmm.

27 Napalm

Less than a year later John requested a special meeting with his boss and, accompanied by his wife and two children, John informed his employer that because of his commitment to the truth and to something he called "right livelihood" he could no longer serve the firm—a consulting company called Western Operations—as its main computer programmer. John thanked his boss, he said goodbye to his associates, and he resigned. He bought and restored a 1948 International Harvester school bus, transformed its interior into living quarters for his family, and joined the caravan of other used school buses, old trucks, and Volkswagen vans that Stephen Gaskin led on a tour—a pilgrimage—around the country. When John's vehicle stalled, he was flat broke, and he called me to ask if I would lend him two hundred dollars so he and his family could return to California and start over.

John was my best friend.

I did.

No questions asked.

Not more than a year later John spent two nights with me and my family in Tempe as he hitchhiked his way to and from Summertown, Tennessee, where he said Gaskin and his disciples in the caravan had just returned, bought farmland, and founded a monastic collective and commune they called The Farm.

When he stopped overnight with me on his way back home, John told me a story of one of the nights he had spent at the commune. The community had gathered wood and built a huge bonfire, and members of the The Farm sat or stood in a wide circle around it. Gaskin, with a full beard and shoulder-length hair like every other man at The Farm, had sprained his ankle earlier in the day and on the night in question he had leaned on a staff, looking like an Old Testament prophet, John told me, as Gaskin addressed his hundred and fifty or so disciples. They were still living in their buses, vans, and trucks, or in tents, and Gaskin had been trying to rally and inspire his weary and discouraged followers. He sensed something, he had told the group, bad vibes he said he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"What is it?" he asked.

No one knew.

"I feel it," Gaskin said frowning. "What is it?"

No one knew.

"What is it?" Gaskin asked again.

John told me that his paranoia ratcheted up another notch each time Gaskin had inquired. John was certain it was his own lack of faith in the idealistic enterprise that his teacher felt. It was his own doubt, his own failure of belief, that was the source of the negativity.

John was sure.

John said he felt like Judas must have felt at the Last Supper.

"What is it?"

"It's me, it's me!" John told me he was just about to shout. "It's my doubt that you feel! It's me!"

But then only a split second before he confessed his doubt and embarrassed himself, John said, someone on the other side of the circle had called out and suggested that everyone was just worried and tired. The spell that bound John was broken and the speech and actions that followed were ordinary.

We laughed about it.

Joked.

Unable at that time to join them, in 1972 John moved his family back to Ames, Iowa, where eleven years earlier he and I had first met as classmates in freshman English, and now in Ames John had been employed in a variety of jobs, the last as a rodman on a survey crew for the state highway commission.

The war continued.

A million dead.

Two.

Here's what just a hundred look like—

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

kkkkkkkkkk

The prayer of Robert Bly, "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," written in 1970, I did not know until decades had passed. But it has helped me more than I can say. Here is part of it:

But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,

came toward you like a gray barn, walking,

you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,

you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,

you would drive over your own child's wagon trying to back up,

the pupils of your eyes would go wild.

If a child came by burning, you would dance on your lawn,

trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,

you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom

like a bull penned too long in his moody pen.

If one of those children came toward me with both hands

in the air, fire rising along both elbows,

I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,

I would drop on all fours, screaming,

my vocal chords would turn blue; so would yours,

it would be two days before I could play with one of my own children again.

On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut photographed Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old girl in Vietnam, screaming, crying, naked, running up the road from her village toward the camera in agony, terror, and pain, the adhesive jellied gasoline called napalm burning hellish holes through the skin and muscle of her flesh to the bone. It haunted me, it haunts me still, I think it will haunt me forever.

I want to drop on all fours and scream.

Yes.

I want to drop on all fours and scream.

I want to drop on all fours and scream.

I want to drop on all fours and scream.

26 John

Though ultimately I failed to finish my dissertation and thus failed also to earn my degree, it was during those two years in the desert that I made my first real contact with what I learned only later had been a form of Buddhism.

John Ward, now a computer programmer and part-time hippy in San Francisco and my best friend since we'd both been freshmen in an honors English class at Iowa State in Ames, had been attending something he called Monday Night Class, a weekly assembly of students, hippies, drug addicts, potheads, draft evaders, pacifists, truants, runaways, and street people, odd seekers of all kinds, the discussion moderated by a man named Stephen Gaskin.

When I visited John and his wife Susan and their two children for a week in San Francisco, John clearly had fallen under Gaskin's spell. His teaching was all John talked about.

It was all about doing what was right and only what was right.

Being good.

The mission, John informed me without a trace of irony, was to save the world. As I understood the teaching, this meant, first, nonviolence; second, honesty; and, third, compassion.

Since by now I was already committed personally to pacifism and nonviolence—though I had so far been not especially public or vocal about it—and had been so committed for eight years, it was the intensity of John's commitment to the principle of honesty that most impressed me.

There was to be no exception.

None.

"We believe we should tell the truth all the time," John told me.

John looked straight into my eyes as we talked; and this gesture, I quickly learned, always accompanied the teaching. A wavering gaze—to blink or to look away—either in others or in oneself was considered an indication of weakness, avoidance, evasion, insincerity, or dishonesty. In our conversations and debates this meeting and locking of our eyes reminded me of the stare down contests I held with my little brother when we were children.

It was true—for me at least—that someone staring continuously into my eyes as we talked pulled up or seemed to pull up from deep within me insecurities and vague anxieties and fears. It did indeed make me feel as if John and his acquaintances—all students of the teacher they called simply Stephen—were able to see the real me through the windows of my soul.

I felt vulnerable and exposed.

Naked.

Though I had always looked people in the eye when I spoke with them, now, connected to this assessment of truth and untruth, looking people in the eye seemed to possess a profound and mysterious new power of which I had been previously unaware. By nature an open, unafraid, and honest individual among my many male friends, I adjusted quickly to this new convention and expectation of the local social environment and, though it continued to make once normal conversation unusually intense, in a few hours I no longer experienced any serious discomfort. John introduced me to his friends, and my meeting several more students and disciples of Stephen, themselves equally committed to this policy and practice of complete honesty, soon transformed what I had formerly understood and had enjoyed merely as honest, candid, casual conversation into religion.

Inquiry resembled inquisition, reply confession.

Mysticism.

I was a professor of English working toward my third college degree and I had never in my life experienced language and reason used together like this. Sometimes stated explicitly but at other times not, at the base of every conversation there lay like its fundamental moral premise the sole question to be answered. It seemed to possess an occult power.

"What are we supposed to do?"

This question answered, one was expected to do it. The question had invariably a moral and ethical intent though the specific doing might refer to a deed in the immediate present, the next day, in the next week, in the next ten years, or every day for the rest of one's life. Only years later would I learn that the question was in one sense rhetorical since Gaskin and my friend John and his friends had already committed themselves to what Buddhists call the three pure precepts.

What are we supposed to do?

We are supposed to—

Do no harm.

Do good.

Save all beings.

I had planned to visit for a week but I stayed only three days. For ten years I had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day and—thanks to the influence of Stephen and Monday Night Class—John had recently quit. For several weeks now, I learned, he had demanded that his wife quit, too. Each day of my visit I witnessed lengthy debates on the subject, arguments and quarrels, and on several occasions when John seemed to me to bully his wife eventually I had joined in her defense. On the third day I, too, had been issued an ultimatum. I could stay with him, John told me, for the remaining four days of my visit only if I did not smoke. At that time this was all way too much for me—total honesty, stare down contests, and now I was forbidden to smoke. John and I parted still friends, but I flew back to Phoenix on the next available flight. Back at home I wrote John a long letter in which I described what I had observed during my visit and I criticized what I considered his dictatorial and unjust treatment of his wife.

"You demand that she obey you!" I said.

No.

"Not true," John responded.

No.

In nineteen single-spaced handwritten pages of stationery John replied point by point by point to each of my allegations and as a part of each rebuttal John also explained its larger moral and philosophical context. His argument was articulate, logical, calm. Legal testimony, personal observation, religious zeal, academic argument, and even friendly effort to explain, it was both a fantastic manifestation of John's patient commitment to truth and—it also appeared to me at the time—insane. I had been a student and teacher of language and literature for eight years and I had never read anything like it.   

"My wife is not required to stop smoking only because I demand that she obey me," John wrote. "She is required to stop smoking because the two of us together have agreed that we will always try to do only what is honest and right and good and that what is honest and right and good not just for the both for us but also for the world is that we not smoke."

Sheesh.