36 Enlightenment

Enlightenment.

That was what he was seeking, John explained, and he could no longer see any reason for seeking anything else, no matter what, so he was going to be as honest as he could. The truth was everything, John said, so as best as he was able John was going to try to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, without exception.

Huh?

There was no truth.

The truth was the belief of fanatics.

Truth was subjective, relative, complex, ironic, incommunicable, ambivalent, ambiguous, beyond the grasp of human being, it was a mirage, an illusion, a delusion, indeed it was nothing at all, and outside of mathematics and the hard sciences—and maybe even there, too—any pursuit of truth led to inhumanity and to the creation and tyranny of cruel monsters and insane madmen like Hitler and Stalin. In my interpretations of literature, if necessary I had manufactured truths congruent with the preconceptions, biases, and prejudices of teachers, instructors, professors, nonteaching educators, members of boards and committees, in short all those constituencies essential to my own academic success.

I was good at this.

At eighteen I had registered for the draft. Had I been called I would have gone. I knew no alternative. Even to consider opposition then seemed impossible. By twenty-eight I had become liberal, pacifistic, and sympathetic to the ideals of a nonviolent communism—were such a thing even possible—but I had never myself seriously considered a revolutionary act and would have been embarrassed and frightened by any suggestion that I should. John was my best and oldest friend from college. He had been the first in my clique to smoke marijuana, to oppose the war in Vietnam, and to promote the theories of Karl Marx.

I considered John super-intelligent, a genius even.

But enlightenment?

I was attracted to Gaskin's point of view on both sex and drugs. Married couples married other couples and became four-marriages, six-marriages, eight-marriages, and open marriages to boot—proverbial free love, essentially, so long as it was all consensual and honest—and pot, too, marijuana, was not simply smoked and condoned, no, it was much more than that, a sacrament, in fact, like the bread and wine of Christianity.

These gifts of "enlightenment" I liked a lot.

In this commune, this monastery, it sounded like if I were just open and honest about it all I would be able to get stoned, to fuck more than one woman, and still be not only a monk but a bodhisattva and maybe even a saint.

John came on very strong, intensely, earnestly honest and pious and moral, and yet he maintained his remarkable sense of humor, his irony, his friendliness, he laughed and joked easily and often, and all this was persuasive, sincere. But he was going to do, he said, only what was right.

Religion.

No.

Not what I wanted.

At all.

35 Discontent

After John told me that he was seeking enlightenment and that he did not want anything else but enlightenment and only enlightenment, I began myself to reconsider the entire idea and it began to make some slight sense in my head, and I became restless with intellectual excitement and with a strange kind of fear about my wasted, selfish past, and I found it hard to concentrate or completely to relax, so I was often pacing about the house in circles or thumbing idly through my index of names and telephone numbers not knowing exactly whom or what I wanted to call or why or what I might ask or say, but it seemed as if I should connect to someone or something in some psychic, mystic way about some deep, unconscious holy alliance which had been alive and growing for centuries, even millennia, while I slept.

My normal entertainments and activities became dully unsatisfying, and now I felt also vaguely unfulfilled with teaching, reading, sports, conversation, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, dining out with casual friends in pleasant restaurants, with new possessions and objects, with cars, clothes, wines, furnishings, with jokes, and with the predictable stories among acquaintances of awards, jobs, firings or potential firings, promotions, pregnancies, divorces, affairs, and even with sexual flirtations and fantasies. For the first time in my life I felt vaguely unhappy and I knew not why nor how this unhappiness had come to be, for in the past I had been always inwardly exuberant and self-loving and secretly thrilled with the everyday risks, chances, betrayals, threats, and desires of ordinary life. I felt, too, that I was a good person, acceptably moral and proper given the degree of repression, dishonesty, and hypocrisy taken for granted as a matter of course not just in academic life but also in normal, middle-class American suburban living.

I had been making progress.

I was straight-A in course work for my Ph.D. in English. I had passed the twenty-four hours of comprehensive written examinations and had also passed, with one embarrassing dissenting vote, the bizarre, surreal oral examination over the period of my specialization in American literature before which two members of my Ph.D. committee had first misled me and then asked questions of me about writers and periods they had stated I needed not review. Then I'd had approved by my advisor and the chairman of my committee the first three chapters of my doctoral dissertation on Herman Melville.

This done, I had packed my bags and gone home to the school I left two years before. I was a popular, resourceful professor, still young, and I had gone back to graduate school when I was awarded a year's pay by the institution I had served for three years. In graduate school, where my seminar papers were read and admired, my professors regularly enjoined me to publish. They praised my mastery of the conventions of academic discourse and my skeptical and ironic wit. I was expert at the prevailing academic method, which was to demonstrate and to prove, supposedly, some truth of philosophy, psychology, or literature by adducing lines and words from the text and from other, secondary exposition, all of this termed "evidence" by the scholars of the humanities and the arts, themselves locked in a vicious economic death struggle with scientists whose proofs were mathematical and practical and produced wealth and merchandise or intimidated and controlled or destroyed enemies. These key passages, lines, and words were mined from stories and poems and then set between quotation marks like precious stones, gems of evidence, like "that" and like "this," in the English prose I generated according to my professors' critical formulae. I seemed assured of a tenured, permanent, well-paying job in a private liberal arts college; or should I wish eventually to move to a large state university—and at that time I did not—yes, that, too, seemed possible. My two children were healthy and athletic, intelligent, and optimistic. My marriage was a comfortable compromise.

My life and career seemed set.

I had accepted the grim, meaningless busywork of American education, the greed and the power of academic competition; after all, I had succeeded at it, I had won and had been rewarded for my intelligence and for my wit, I was smart and good with words, shrewd, voluble, articulate, sarcastic, and I could win again.

I had embraced the lies and denials of society. These were to be deplored and lamented in the abstract and their antonyms, the hopeless ideals, rediscovered within unread classics, brought again, shining, to the light of professional scholarship, and reaffirmed. By the conventional American standard I had led a dissolute life but I was no real rebel.

34 Truth

Gaskin's creed—and therefore John's—was not purely Buddhism, I gradually learned, so much as it was an eclectic Buddhist-based blend of many world religions and philosophies. But Gaskin did teach nonviolence, honesty, and service to all humankind—what I later understood as a kind of broad Mahayana Buddhism. John's tales and anecdotes of the weird, his references to moral magic, his odd books and unusual experiences, his quitting his job to follow "the path," his insistence upon openness and total honesty all the time without exception and—yes—his commitment to a life of moral rectitude and integrity had stirred my discontent. Though he had never been wealthy and most considered him poor, John and his wife had always been unusually generous, and half a dozen times they had invited needy acquaintances to move in with them free of charge until they could find work and stand on their own two feet again. By contrast I myself had quite a lot—two college degrees and nearly a third, a good job in a respected profession, and promising prospects for the future. But I also shared many if not most of the failings of other men like myself, young college professors in the soft sciences, arts, and humanities. I drank to excess, I smoked pot, and I cheated on my wife, all three of which I considered vices so minor I thought them hardly vices at all.

The third was my only real secret.

Without an inkling of its irony, I thought of myself as an honest, likeable man. But now—no thanks to John—I had my doubts. Like me, John drank beer and smoked grass, and he had not condemned me for my infidelity, but now he said, yes, he did disapprove of it. Until this infatuation with Gaskin, John had never questioned—to my face at least—my chronic sexual misconduct.

But now there was this peculiar and powerful business of honesty.

Truth.

33 Prayer

When my mother was fifteen years old, she contracted spinal meningitis. Her temperature rose nine degrees higher than normal and she nearly died. Her doctors seemed helpless. Every day and night, my mother told me, her parents knelt beside her bed and prayed to God for her life and indeed she did recover and live; but as a result of her terrible illness my mother lost her hearing and for the rest of her life she was totally deaf.

"Her fever blew that fuse in her brain," my father would explain.

"Oh."

Both my mother and her father attributed her survival at least in part to God and to the power of prayer and I know this experience is an important factor in my mother's own religious faith.

Much more important to my own understanding of life in this universe is another story my mother told me of her own and her family's acceptance of and adjustment to the loss of her hearing in the aftermath of their ordeal. When except for her being deaf my mother had fully recovered and was well, her father gathered the family together for a meeting.

They were not going to be bitter, her father told them, they were not going to blame God, they were not going to blame the doctors, they were not going to blame themselves, they were not going to be resentful, they were not going to be discouraged, they were not even going to be sad.

"It's over and done with," her father told the family. "We're going to put it behind us and go forward."

"It was so smart of him to say that," my mother told me. "I was so grateful."

I understood.

"His attitude helped me so much."

Yes.

It has helped me, too, many times.

Forward.

The hardest I ever prayed was when Leigh got pregnant our senior year of high school. From the day Leigh told me she'd missed her second period and was sure now that she was pregnant until the day three weeks later when I somehow found the courage to tell my father, the first thing I did every morning the moment I woke up was to hang my head over the edge of my bed and gag with the dry heaves. For three weeks every night in bed before I turned and tossed and struggled for hours to fall asleep I prayed like a fucking fiend.

"Jesus! Please! God! No!"

Once I was away from my parents and out on my own I never went back to Church. By my sophomore year of college I no longer called myself Christian. To make a long story short I'll say just that I didn't believe Jesus was a god. Neither did I nor would I ever believe in—let alone worship—a god who judged, punished, and even tortured people simply because of what they did or did not believe.

Yet I was more than familiar with the central stories of what Christians pejoratively call the Old Testament and of course with the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and with his teachings, and my childhood education in these matters paid considerable intellectual dividends in my analyses and interpretations of literature at Iowa State, Indiana, and Arizona State universities.

For me then as for most Americans even now the word "religion" meant Judaism maybe and Christianity mainly if not only. Though I did respect the role that religion played in the protests and nonviolence of Gandhi and King, I did not really understand it; and by 1974 I believed that religion of any kind—Christianity in particular—was long behind me. Except as an interesting superstition, a curiosity of intellectual history, and a necessary instrument of literary exegesis I considered religion both meaningless and stupid.

Little did I know.

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.