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Prologue
There
was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys— the irrepressible
macaca fuscata — living on the island of Koshima in 1952; incidentally
the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with sweet
potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally
seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain unpleasant
grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo
discovered that if she took her potato down to the water’s
edge, she could rinse off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier
meal. Imo taught her mother and playmates the trick,
and gradually, over the course of six years, one monkey after
another adopted the practice.
Then
in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing
monkeys reached what is called a "critical mass," and
suddenly, not only did the entire monkey population on Koshima
Island start performing the new procedure, but all of the
monkey populations on neighboring islands spontaneously began
washing their potatoes as well!
"The
Hundredth Monkey" became the name futurists used for
this unusual phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey-experience
to show that this is also the way the human community makes
dramatic, collective paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking,
being and behaving. Once a critical mass of people have
transformed their essentially materialist world-view to a
spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the
planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride.
The dirty sweet potato of being a self-centered, acquisitive,
power-hungry creature, blindly bent on the destruction of
life as we know it, will be gently washed in the stream of
loving-kindness, peacefulness and the desire to serve God
and humanity, ushering in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity
for all people.
***
Fat
chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the
99th Monkey. If you don't get me, you don't get your
critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I
seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm
Shift of the Golden Age through my simply continuing to be
a resistant little putz most of the time. My apologies.
(If
it makes you feel any better, I recently heard somewhere
that this whole story about the monkeys and the potatoes
is not true, that it didn't really happen that way at all.
That really annoyed me, considering that I’d just based a whole
book on it.)
***
I
met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New
York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing
the est training in Boston, which was several months after
having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in
Primal Therapy. I was desperately trying to cure myself of
being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three
decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans,
healers and gurus, stay in ashrams and monasteries, sit for
long hours on meditation cushions, chant in foreign tongues,
and live up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat.
I
experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient
spiritual techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged,
shiatsu-ed, and rolfed, took hundreds of consciousness workshops,
human potential seminars, and self-improvement courses, sat
with psychics, channels and tarot readers, experienced Primal,
Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies
and anti-depressants. And that’s the short list. (The
complete one gets embarrassing. Suffice it to say that
it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality
weekend —you
don’t want to know — as well as having an obese female
therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could
re-experience being smothered by my mother.)
As
Editor-in-Chief of the New Sun magazine in the ‘70s
and the Wild Heart Journal more
recently, and through being a freelance spiritual journalist,
it has often been my job to do all these things. Like a scout
sent ahead to report back, I often saved others a lot of
time: “You don’t
have to go deep into Brazil to do all-night rituals involving
the ingestion of ayahuasca, chanting in Portuguese to Oxum,
the Mother of the Waters, and throwing up out of a church
window at four in the morning — I already did that.”
Most
stories like this end with an epiphany: the seeker finds
what he or she was looking for, writes a book about it to
inspire others, and then with any luck, appears on Oprah
and becomes very wealthy. Unfortunately, in my story, I remain
more or less the same guy — or as my friend Eddie Greenberg
would say, the “same old schmuck” — at the end
as I was at the beginning.
An
earlier version of this book was turned down by one publisher,
who said, “The main character’s story just doesn’t
seem to hang together.”
Buh-buh-buh-but,
I thought: This is a memoir; this is autobiographical… I
AM the main character!
But
he was right. My story doesn’t hang together. Whose
does, really? Nothing bugs me more than those self-help authors
who start out as a complete mess, find a magic solution,
and then try to sell the rest of us on a new and improved
way to live, while getting very rich in the process. At
least this much I can promise you: apart from a few laughs
and some good stories, this book will very definitely not
change your life. Fortunately, every bona fide
spiritual teacher worth their salt will remind you again
and again that you don’t
need to change your life in order to get enlightened, find
God, or be your Self.
Again
and again, we seekers of truth are told that our primordial,
essential nature is always already the case, always and only
available now, no matter what the circumstances of our inner
or outer lives, and therefore all desire to change our inner
or outer lives in order to somehow get closer to the ever-elusive
spiritual prize are not only fruitless, but are actually
the problem itself. Seeking truth or God or enlightenment
or Buddha nature is the equivalent, it has often been said,
of a fish swimming endlessly in search of water. Once
our great quest has commenced, we have already missed the
point and are on the wrong track.
***
Had
I only known.
***
I
recently read Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan
Illych," because in dramatic contrast to War
and Peace,
it is very short. The story invites contemplation of perhaps
the worst accusation of all: a life lived wrong. But
Ivan doesn't get it until he's lying on his death bed. You
and I still have time, although not a whole lot, really.
Which is why I generally never read memoirs or biographies.
Who can afford to spend their time reading about someone
else's life?
Nor
do I presume that you should spend your time reading about
my life. Unless, of course, it's funny. And ask anybody:
I'm usually a pretty funny guy, apart from those times when
I’m lamenting the fact that, like Ivan Illych, I may
have lived my entire life completely incorrectly and now
it’s
too late to make it right. It isn’t too late, of course,
given that another thing the sages often like to chuckle
about is that enlightenment is “only a thought away,” or
that God is “closer to us than our own breath.” Nevertheless,
we all know time is short, and so it’s good to always
keep in mind what the famous Tibetan Yogi Milarepa once said:
"You people who gather here
think that death will
come sauntering over to you.
NO!
Whenever death comes,
it strikes like lightning."
I
got caught in a riptide in the Outer Banks of North Carolina
a few summers ago, and didn’t know that the trick is
to swim parallel to shore, as opposed to panicking and thrashing
about wildly and coming extremely close to drowning. Close
enough to get a glimpse of the shocking recognition, “Oh
my God, I’m actually drowning, this is it. I can’t
believe I’m dying today.” Milarepa
was right: it did feel like lightning, coming out of nowhere
when I least expected it. There are lots of stories
about people who emerge from such experiences with a renewed
sense of aliveness and appreciation, and begin living with
more passion and making major lifestyle changes and so on.
Leave it to me to be the one guy who manages to blow a near-death
experience and
just carry on as if nothing much happened.
Be that as
it may, if you're going to take the time to read a book,
it ought to, at the very least, have an impact. Father William
McNamara, a Carmelite monk, once said: "Never read
good books. There's no time for that. Only read great
ones."
Or funny
ones.
***
Books that impacted my life in
my early 20s:
1)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
The day I finished The
Fountainhead, I dropped out of the music department
at Northwestern University, having decided to be an architect
like Howard Roark, the hero of the book. However, I then
discovered that Northwestern didn't have an architecture
department, so I enrolled in the closest thing to it, Interior
Art and Design. I
went to the first day of classes where we were asked to make
little couches out of construction paper, and I dropped out
of college completely. And thus began the sequence
of adventures recounted in this book.
2)
Most everything by Jack Kerouac, particularly The
Town and the City and Desolation
Angels.
He stirred the passionate,
poignant, prose-poet in me, the vagabond artist-seeker, albeit
with a credit card, very generous parents, and a suburban,
upper middleclass Jewish sensibility. In other words, I was
absolutely nothing like Kerouac.
3)
The Outsider, by Colin Wilson.
Like a million other people,
I thought the book was about me. Someone finally gave
me a label I could get behind. And while I still romantically
fancy myself an “outsider,” it could also be
argued that I simply do not like to work and with one exception,
have never had a real job in the world for longer than about
nine months.
The
true Outsider, Wilson explains, is someone who has somehow
intuited or glimpsed the vast, empty, infinite possibility
of eternal life and spirit, but is now somehow separate from
that experience except as a nagging memory, and their life
is fueled by the intense and obsessive desire to "get
it back." Their art and their religious life become
an expression of that quest for authenticity and essence.
The
most difficult part for outsiders, Wilson says, is the realization
that although as humans they have been given the most extraordinary
and abundant gifts and an infinitely mysterious and magical
existence filled with beauty and love, they seem to be ironically
lacking only one thing: the simple ability to appreciate
and enjoy any of it. Ahab said it like this:
"This
lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish
to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception,
I lack the low enjoying power; damned in the midst of Paradise!"
I
hate that “ne’er enjoy” part. And considered
in that light, I truly am an outsider. I once interviewed
Colin Wilson via e-mail for the Wild
Heart Journal. Here
is our conversation, verbatim:
Me:
Please elaborate on the connection between the artist's impulse
toward creativity and expression and the religious person's
yearning for spiritual freedom or union.
Colin: Ooof! I
don't feel like writing you an essay to answer that question.
Norman Mailer once said to me that he got fed up with people
who, after a lecture, asked ten-cent questions that required
ten-dollar answers, and this is an example. I just
don't have time to write you pages and pages on religion
and creativity. Ask
more down to earth questions, like how old are you, have
you ever had syphilis, etc. and I'll answer. (The answer
to those is 67 and no.)
It
was a very short interview. (And FYI, that conversation
was about seven years ago, so Wilson would be 74 now, and
hopefully, still free of STDs.)
***
Jewish
people in America and elsewhere are almost always given two
names at birth— one in their native language, and one in
Hebrew. My English name is Elliot, and I used it most of
my life. Eliezer
is my Hebrew name. It’s pronounced eh-lee-eh — (as
in bed) — zer. Rhymes with Nebuchadnezzer, the
infamous Babylonian king. "Eli" means God and "ezer" means
help, so Eliezer means "God is my help." I
was upset that all of my friends on a spiritual path had
been given new spiritual names by their teachers at some
point, to help them shift their primary identities away from
their limited personalities over to their True Nature. Most
of the names were Hindu, like Krishna, Arjuna, Ananda, and
so on. Generally the names meant something along the
lines of "Blissful Consciousness," and it was thought
that even if you were totally miserable and depressed, your
spiritual name would help you remember that your real Self
was nevertheless still having a gay old time of it.
Interestingly,
in Judaism, one of the last-ditch methods for healing someone
is to change their name, thus tricking God, who might otherwise
have had their name inscribed in the "Sayanara Sucker" column
of the Book of Life. I once took a workshop in which we were
asked to take on a new name just for the weekend. People
chose names like "Fun," "Gentle Being," and "Millionairress," trying
to cultivate specific, desired qualities. I became Crescent
Jewel. My friend Eddie chose the name "Jim."
By
the way, ordinarily Jews write the word God as G-d, never
spelling it out on paper. This avoids the possibility of
being suddenly burdened by a piece of paper that is considered
sacred because it contains the Holy Name, and which you therefore
can never throw away; but since you don’t really want
this scrap of paper, you wind up with a box of them in the
attic. What’s
more, if we avoid spelling out “God” and the
document in question does get thrown away, we’ve only
thrown out a hyphenated word, and not the actual name of
God. Predicated on the prior assumption, I guess, that if
we did spell it out and the paper got thrown away, it would
be akin to trashing our G-d, the presumably Untrashable One.
***
There's
a great definition of heaven and hell I read somewhere: after
death, you are shown a film of your life as you lived it,
as well as a film of your life as you could have lived it,
given your highest possibilities and potential. The closer
the two films match, the closer you are to heaven. The
greater the distance, the more hellish. I'm shown
those two films everyday in my own mind. And I'm trapped
in the theater, like some surreal cinema in The Twilight
Zone that only shows the same two movies for all Eternity.
At least they're both comedies.
***
The morning dew flees away
Is no more
What remains
in this world of ours?
— Ikkyu
I've
always been interested in reading the enigmatic dying words
of great people — particularly Zen masters. My
favorite was Suzuki Roshi, whose last words to those assembled
at his deathbed were simply, "I don't want to die." There
was no hidden meaning, which is the essence of Zen.
Allen
Ginsberg, who spent his life writing so many meaningful words
and wonderful lines of poetry, apparently ended his life
with only one word. But it was a great word, one of his best
ever: "Tootles." (It's possible I'm completely
misinformed about this, but I like the story whether it's
true or not.)
Timothy
Leary's last words were "Why not?" And his
last words to William Burroughs were, "I hope someday
I'm as funny as you."
My
friend Karen's father was shoveling snow when his wife came
out on the porch, screaming, "STOP SHOVELING, OR YOU'RE
GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK!" to which he responded, "IF
I HAVE A HEART ATTACK, IT'S GOING TO BE FROM YOU SCREAMING
AT ME!" Then he dropped dead.
A
friend of mine was standing around having a conversation
with a 55ish male acquaintance, and in the middle of a sentence
he too just dropped to the ground, dead. His last words,
my friend told me, were “Hey, it was good seeing you.”
Finally,
they say that Gandhi was such an evolved devotee of the Lord
that at the moment of his death — when he was shot — he had
the presence of mind to utter his sacred mantra, one of the
Hindu names for God: "Ram." But when they
depicted this in the film, it was in English, and came across
more like the way it probably happened: when Gandhi was shot
in the film, he said, "Oh God," which is more or
less what any ordinary shlub like you or me would say if
we were shot.
***
I was an interfaith,
non-denominational hospital chaplain some years ago. My colleagues
in the hospital were a Presbyterian reverend, a Mennonite
minister, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor — (I never
learned the difference between a minister, a reverend and
a pastor) — an Episcopalian seminarian, and an Apostles of
Christ Holy Roller Pentacostalist. Plus,
a Methodist, a Baptist and a minister of the United Church
of Christ. The hospital was in the Bible Belt;
all the patients were Christians, meaning they were followers
of the teachings of Jesus Christ, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph
Christ, as described in the New Testament. As a Jewish
Buddhist Sufi New Age pot-smoking aging hippie, it wasn't
exactly a perfect fit for me.
(Although
I secretly believe Jesus Christ was also a Jewish Buddhist
Sufi New Age hippie, albeit probably without the use of pot.
Although some claim he spent a lot of time in India before
starting his Son of Man career, and if that's true, then
he easily might have smoked some hashish chillums with the
local Shiva babas — what young guy backpacking through India
on a spiritual quest wouldn't?)
Milarepa’s “lightning
of death” struck the people I ministered to in the
hospital all the time. But in that situation nobody ever
had the opportunity to say their last words, because they
were always on morphine, fentenol, and various other medications,
which allowed them to remain unconscious and without pain
as they made their passage to the Great Beyond. When I saw
this again and again, I quickly made out a living will in
which I asked that I not be sedated at the time of death,
that I'd rather be awake, even if in pain, so I could at
least come up with some pithy, enigmatic last words. My
wife Shari laughed when she heard this, pointing out that
I tend to take five Advil for the slightest headache, so
intolerant am I of enduring pain of any sort.
But
what a disappointment it would be if, in addition to whatever
else was causing me to be on my deathbed, I also suffered
from writer's block, just when it was time for my last words.
As a writer, if I am to take death seriously, I must always
remain aware that these may very well be my last words. |
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