Pioneer Stock Mormons were 19th century pioneers. They settled in the western states because they were an unfashionable religion, new and unpolished and radical. No roots dating back centuries to ancient European cultures. No tradition of scholarly theology and no tradition of being "pillars of the community." Just some guy in upstate New York who one day in 1830 started having visions, declaring all existing religions bankrupt, and founding a new one of his own. Such behavior tends to offend the local city fathers, and so Joseph Smith's band of disaffected visionaries fled to the unsettled freedom of the west. Their character is still rooted in those 19th century pioneer origins. Rough-hewn. Moralistic. Coarse fabrics and calloused hands. Conservative and wholesome, highly industrious. And their theology is still of the 19th century, without the benefit of centuries of time to polish their tenants. Mormons still believe in a patriarchal god, and a church in which only the men can hold office. They believe (as a matter of theology) in stocking foodstuffs ("a year's supply") for hardtimes. Blacks, like women, are forbidden to hold church office, yet American Indians are revered as a "chosen people." They are world-class genealogists, owing to a belief that people who have died can be baptized as Mormons through a living surrogate. Hence, all one's relatives can be "converted" and thus saved, whether they were ever Mormons or not. And indeed, if they carry on long enough, we can imagine that eventually all of humanity who ever lived will be Mormons, whether they like it or not. Having been raised as a Mormon, some of this is no doubt still in my blood. Especially the well-scrubbed moralism. But it was hard to maintain a 19th century outlook as a baby boomer growing up in the 50s and 60s in America. By age 13, I had become an unrepentant atheist, which struck me as the only sensible position to take in the circumstances. Secular Humanists I was, it now seems, a secular humanist for many years. Long before today's Christian fundamentalists alerted me to the fact that this put me on their enemies list. And I found this an agreeable avocation, until my senior year in college when the tiniest chink opened in my armor. I enrolled in a graduate seminar on "Contemporary Issues In Psychology" in the spring of 1973. The crowning event of the seminar turned out to be a field trip to the home of one of the students for a demonstration of "psychic reading." Rosemary was middle-aged and overweight, a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. She held forth with dramatic flourish, taking objects from the group and touching them to her forehead, receiving questions in sealed envelopes, even once sending the professor trundling off to the basement to concentrate on a question she would attempt to divine. Nancy was her polar opposite. Young, lovely, shoulder length brown hair, soft eyes of an even deeper brown, jeans tucked into knee-length boots, peasant blouse. Very hip. Lingering images of a 60s flower-child. I fell in love instantly. In contrast to Rosemary's panache, Nancy's approach was soft and quiet. She worked by taking both your hands in hers and looking openly in your eyes. And in an almost too perfect gesture, she chose me as her first subject. We went into another room where she began to tell me about myself. Although her observations were general, they also tended to be uncomfortably close to the truth. Despite my skeptical mind-set, I found myself being stirred in an unaccustomed way. Throughout her general commentary she kept returning to one very specific point. "I see", she revealed, "a man with a full gray beard, in a chemistry laboratory." "Who is this man?" "I have no idea," was my puzzled reply. "No," she insisted, "he is very important to you, he is a major influence on the course of your life." "Are you sure you don't know him?" "Quite sure," I replied. "Well, you will." With that insistent prediction, my first psychic reading ended. It was interesting, and pleasant enough. Out of it all I was left only with that strange Ides of March business about the fellow with the gray beard, and a certain feeling, a curious afterglow of emotion, most like being in love, but somehow not personal. Both were soon forgotten. Ripening I began my graduate work in earnest at Indiana University in the lovely little town of Bloomington, surrounded by the cornfields of the Midwest countryside and the limestone quarries of central Indiana. A visiting professor from England took one look and exclaimed, "Oh, what a charming little village!" And so it was. Graduate school was more than I dared hoped. I was working toward a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science. In training to become a professional secular humanist. I was captivated by dazzling cerebral entertainments: space/time physics, relativity, neuroscience, logic and mathematics. A pagan's dream come true! Fall of '73, Spring of '74 came and went. Entering the second year I was growing restless. I seemed to be succeeding at my dreams, yet the successes brought little joy. Something was missing. By the spring of 1975 the dream was unraveling. The Chemistry Lab A few days after the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rhouge, and while the last Americans were evacuating Saigon, I found myself attending a lecture on eastern mysticism. Why I went I'm really not sure. But it was a pleasant balmy evening, one of those Midwestern spring evenings which is at once heavy with humidity and light with cool breezes. So off I went with N.J., whom I had met only days before. The lecture was held in one of those combination lab-lecture rooms in the old Chemistry Building, and even with the balcony, many of the 200 or so people had to sit in the aisles. A fellow named Ram Dass entered through a back door and worked his way to a lab table in front. The table was one of those black-slate types with curved water spouts over the sink. Ram Dass placed a large pillow on the slate top and proceeded to climb up, take a cross-legged seat, pull his hair back, stroke his gray beard, look up at the audience and break into a charmingly radiant smile. "There are some delightful ironies in this evening," he began, "including the fact that we are meeting in the Chemistry Building." (Even then, I didn't get it.) He then spoke for well over two hours: about meditation and spiritual life, about the ultimate disappointment of worldly pursuits, about his guru and his teachers, and about his life. The words were incredible. No matter what the topic, it always seemed as if I understood implicitly. He kept ringing my gong. My reaction was, "YES! That's exactly how it is!" But it was not the words so much that affected me as it was his presence. The very air seemed magical. I could almost see something in the air--a kind of sparkling energy. I kept having the sensation that I could almost taste this energy as I breathed. And Ram Dass himself was, well, radiant. I never knew this word had a real referent before. I recall one moment of stark realization: "I don't know what it is this guy has," I found myself thinking, "but whatever it is, that's what I want!" Near the end of the lecture Ram Dass did a guided meditation, and a long session of chanting, in both Sanskrit and English. One chant in particular struck me. It went simply: "Listen, listen, listen to my heart's song. I will never forget you. I will never forsake you. Listen, listen, listen to my heart's song." As I listened, and then sang, my heart shattered, and I wept inside, softly and privately. As the lecture ended the strains of the song were still wafting through the hall. N.J. and I were standing at the back of the room, she leaning against the wall. As I turned to look at her a wave of soft energy came spilling out of my chest, washing over N.J. and bouncing gently against the wall. In an instant I was absolutely, totally in love with N.J. I was so drunk with it I could hardly speak. "My God," I thought, "what's happening to me?" "I barely know this woman. I can't be in love with her." But I felt love, pouring out of my torso, a palpable energy, or feeling or sensation, or something, which I could feel physically and which seemed to radiate out of my body and move through space. As other friends came over to say hello, I was even more surprised to find that the same feeling poured out upon them. I seemed to be in love with anyone who came near me! I was in love, but with no one in particular, just sort of in love in general. I had never imagined that anything like this was possible. As the evening ended, I knew only that this had been the most extraordinary experience of my life. As the months passed, I discovered that I had, in the space of two hours, simply abandoned most of my basic beliefs and had taken on a whole new set. In one brief night I had been transformed from high priest for science into out-and-out spiritual seeker. The Ashram In the wake of Ram Dass' passing through my life I began to look around for more teachings of this sort, and I found them at a local place known as the Rudrananda Ashram. At the Ashram they taught an esoteric spiritual practice known as kundalini yoga. This yoga involves working with various subtle energies to kindle an awakening of spiritual awareness. The work involved concentrating on the teacher, who sat in half-lotus upon a broad, mahogany bench upon a raised platform. The idea was that the teacher was a radiant source of spiritual energy and the students used certain esoteric breathing techniques to draw this energy into themselves and to use it to fuel their own growth. Although I felt the atmosphere was sublime, in class I felt mostly the effort and little else. As I watched the others however, something powerful seemed to be happening. As the teacher focused his stare on this person or that one they would frequently stiffen, and then slump as he looked away. Sometimes the teacher would twist his neck or tilt his head, or raise and lower his shoulder, and in a simultaneous movement the person he was looking at would suddenly lose or gain tension in the corresponding body part. One day I chanced, in my usual accidental way, to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Class had just begun. As as I was feeling a trifle lazy and not at all like a yogi, I was sitting on a folding chair in the back of the meditation hall. I enjoyed no unusual state of consciousness; in fact I had not even begun to do the exercise, I was still busy checking out the crowd. When I looked up at the teacher there were two beams of bright electric-blue light emanating from his eyes. They were as vivid and distinct as his body, or as the back-of-the-head of the person in front of me, or as any ordinary object in the room. As he fixed his gaze on someone the beams would reach out toward them in a start-stop motion, going a ways, then hesitating in the space between them, then moving on to strike them square in the forehead. With the instant of contact, I would see the person flare like an incandescent bulb, sending an aura of white light several inches out from their bodies. Each person glowed differently, some with full auras, some with only a halo around the head. And the connection between the teacher and various students likewise varied: sometimes the beams of blue energy would move without hesitation and contact was long and solid; other times they would make several false starts before traversing the distance to make contact. When the teacher finished with someone, he simply withdrew the light beams to within a few feet of his face, turned his head slightly and then allowed the beams to move out again. I was privy to this phenomenon for the full class. It ceased only when the teacher "turned off his lights" so to speak, and left the room. I never said anything about it to anyone (people were not encouraged to talk about their experiences) and I never saw it again. Although this was clearly an extraordinary event to me, I found it natural and appropriate somehow. But I must admit, while I was prepared to believe any odd esoteric theory about what was going on in class, I was not prepared to imagine that it was actually real! One of the striking phenomena which was quite common was for the teacher to touch someone on the forehead with his finger and thereby seeming to transmit a kind of cosmic zap. Often the student would stiffen momentarily and appear to be filled with an intense burst of energy. This never happened to me, alas, but once, the unexpected (as usual) did. I was sitting near the door, cross-legged and sweating from the effort of trying to open deeply. As the teacher passed by on his way out of the room, he casually touched his fingertip to my forehead. As I said, my model for this was that of the cosmic zap. I had never witnessed any other result. Instead, when he touched me all tension in my body instantly disappeared and I folded back at the waist, my legs still crossed, and simply floated back like a limp rag. Unseen by me the teacher had in fact made two simultaneous gestures, the first to my forehead and the other cradling his hand behind my back to gently catch me and break my fall. The sweat, the tension, the effort all gave way to a simple feeling of well-being. Apparently the cosmic zap could run both hot and cold. Just when I thought I had it figured out, another model bites the dust! During the brief time I attended classes at the Ashram I witnessed other seemingly miraculous manifestations. All of which sound highly eccentric upon reflection, but which seemed entirely appropriate to me at the time. Freelancing Graduate school refused to disappear, although my classes at the Ashram held much more fascination than my courses at the university. The only other truly interesting events during this period were the stray experiences of the kundalini which occurred outside of formal classes. For instance, I had taken to doing a regular routine of hatha yoga (the physical pretzelling most people think of as yoga.) I was especially fond of one posture known as halasana, or plough pose. In this pose you lie on your back with your legs extended straight-out over your head and touching the floor behind you. As I would hold this pose for a few minutes intense heat would begin building at the very tip of my spine, and it would eventually release as a wave of warm, tingling energy, with definite tinges of ecstatic thrill, coursing through my back, sides and abdomen and rising up toward my head. This happened every few days for several months, and always left me feeling calm, rested and energized. I recall with special relish one occurrence during an especially stodgy seminar at school. There were four or five of us hunkered around a huge oak table discussing the sociology of the growth of scientific knowledge (if you can imagine). As I moved to shift in the hard wooden chair I chanced to stretch out my spine, and in so doing I released a flood of energy along the spinal line from the base to the top. This energy swamped my entire body, and it had the sensate quality of peace. Peace as an actual variety of physical energy. I was left in a state of sublime ease, more quiet than I ever remembered being. I could not suppress the slow formation of what must have been an idiot grin, and I was thoroughly uninterested in participating in the seminar from that point on. Around this time another process was inaugurated, which has continued ever since. I began to notice that if I could manage to remain sexually continent for several days I would begin to notice a faint but exquisitely sweet taste which seemed to flow from the roof of my mouth, near the place where the hard palate meets the soft. Later on I discovered that by imaging energy flowing from the region of my genitals toward my head, I could bring on the taste at will. Sometimes a stray erotic thought might cause a minute stirring in my groin, followed in a split-instant by a flow of sweetness falling from the roof of my mouth. I'm not sure I can explain what this is all about, but my faint hunch is that it has something to do with all that traditional business about spirituality and celibacy. Hare Krishna As I hunted around in my hungry way for other opportunities for spiritual nourishment, I tried pretty much any game in town. Against my better judgment, I even went one evening to a lecture and chanting demonstration by the local Hare Krishna sect. I have always felt about the Hare Krishnas pretty the same way the average airport traveler did during the time they inflicted themselves on the traveling public. But I went anyway. The event was held in a lecture hall on campus, and probably less than 20 people showed up to sprinkle ourselves among the 100 or more seats in this large, tiered lecture hall. About half a dozen Hare Krishnas were sitting on the floor in the front, in the standard uniform: orange robes and shaved heads with vestigial ponytails. As the main speaker, a young black man in his early 20s, started talking all my worst fears were instantly confirmed. He was sitting there on the floor talking about peace and love, and seething with anger the whole time. He told us he was a converted Catholic. And then in a long bilious diatribe he related how when he was a Catholic he thought Catholicism was the one and only true religion and that everyone else was going to go to hell. But now that he had converted to Hare Krishna he understood the bigger picture and now he knows that Hare Krishna is the one and only true religion and everybody else, including the Catholics, are going to go to hell. And he said it without even a glimmer of awareness or a wisp of irony. His little hectoring testimony went on for 20 minutes or so, as I scanned the exits and weighed the embarrassment of leaving versus the pain of staying. Mercifully, he finally stopped talking and the group started the chanting portion of the program. Which to me meant only that the end was that much nearer. But soon after the first chant began, a most extraordinary thing happened. I was just sitting there minding my own business and ruefully looking at my watch when something opened in the space above my head. In the area of the room off to the left and up toward the ceiling a sort of space opened up and I begin to hear this enormous cosmic sound. It was a chorus of ancient voices chanting the very chant the Hare Krishnas were chanting in the front of the room, but this chant was enormous and ancient and was like a rapidly moving stream of sound passing from left to right above my head. I wasn't in any special state of awareness; I was perfectly aware that I was sitting in a lecture room with 20 or so other idiots listening to six silly looking guys chant in Sanskrit. It was just that there was this enormous ocean of sound roaring past me at the same time. Finally the chorus of six stopped, and the chorus of thousands did as well. I took this experience to be a genuine psychic opening of some interesting sort. And the fact that it happened in this context taught me an important lesson: Even the biggest of assholes can sometimes generate authentic mystical events. Thus the mere ability to produce even genuine spiritual experience is not, by itself, an indication of any great spiritual stature. I think we would all do well to remember this. On The Bus Being a typical penurious graduate student, I had to travel across country from my home in Arizona by the cheapest means possible, which meant 35 straight hours on the bus. Never being one to welcome sleep easily in the best of circumstances, I am completely unable to do so on a bouncing, clanging, cramped, babies crying, drunks swilling, teenagers bounding, interstate bus. So by the time we were an hour out of Bloomington I had been awake for at least 34 straight hours. Despite the fact that I could not sleep, I tried to do so. I managed only to make it down to that half-awake, half-asleep state, where I would linger until some jarring bus-event would startle me back to full wakefulness. Once, as I was tunneling my way back down, something else happened. I fell through some crack in consciousness, not into sleep or dream, and not back up to wakefulness--although it was in some sense the most awake I have ever been. I "fell" into a place of overwhelming intensity. Everything in the universe vanished and only two qualities remained: a blindingly brilliant white light everywhere, and absolute ecstasy throughout. Light and bliss. There was nothing else anywhere in the universe. Nothing. Period. And this space of light and bliss had enormous dimension. I distinctly felt myself enter into it as if it were a vertical expanse in front of me, which I penetrated only to a slight depth. Then from somewhere far back in my mind I felt my mental apparatus gear up and a string of thoughts moving toward me. "WOW! " "Look at this!" "WOW!" "What's happening?!" The moment the thoughts started they somehow grabbed me and pulled me back, out of the expanse of light and ecstasy. I was instantly wide-awake, back in my cramped seat aboard a Greyhound bus, my heart racing furiously and my mind doing leaps and bounds. But that expanse was still so close! I pushed myself back down by effort of will and fell right back through that same crack. This time I was barely able to brush-up against the surface, only just skim the light and the joy, before my mind began its uncontrollable chatter and I was pulled back again, back on the bus for good! Taking The Plunge Two years later I found myself in Los Angeles, working as a low-level government bureaucrat, and searching for a guru. On Independence Day 1977 I attended the last day of a three-day retreat, to see an American guru, a woman from Brooklyn named Joya. Joya is the most intense human being I have ever met. To this day, more than a decade later, I'm still amazed by the sheer spectacle of her. Long, jet-black hair flowed past her shoulders. Around her neck she wore gold jewelry of all descriptions, and for a time, a necklace of 108 amber beads (a gift from Ram Dass). Two or three bracelets of gold on each wrist punctuated each gesture with the crisp little clangs of gold on gold. In the web of each hand was a small tattoo, a butterfly in one, the word 'OM' in the other. A line of five diamonds ran along the curve of her pierced ears. She was flamboyant and profane, a street-wise Brooklyn housewife turned eastern mystic. She also had the talent, which I am aware of having seen only in exceptional women, of having more than one distinct style or personality. Sometimes she was all passion and sensuality; wrapped in reds and bobbled, bangled and beaded. Fiery. Other times she is an innocent young girl; whites and coarse woven cottons, her eyes soften and glow. Then there was the darkly powerful mother; somber and smoldering in deep purples and heavy eyes. And then sometimes a distant, lifeless mood in which she seemed not to be present at all, ancient mysteries reflected in her empty eyes. I noticed, too, over the years, that different devotees responded to different faces of their guru. I would see them sort of languish in the background when Joya was expressing as her other styles, and then when she became, say Joya the glowing young girl, certain ones would perk up and begin to banter and attract her attention. And certain others would visibly deflate. At the close of the retreat there was a period known as darshan, during which we had an opportunity to meet Joya and ask her questions. I entered the room with a group of about 20 people and took an inconspicuous position along the back wall, hoping to see without being seen. But Joya called me to come sit in front of her on the floor, our knees touching. She asked me a question and I was so scared my voice quivered as I tried to answer. She stopped short, took both my hands in hers and looked deeply into my eyes. She then looked above my head and appeared to focus in the far distance, she let out a hearty laugh and said: "Ah, you're like a ripe mango. Move into my L.A. house immediately!" Well, I had come looking for a guru, and here was one making me an offer. It was time to take the leap, and leap I did! The L. A. House A week later I moved into a communal house with six other people in the gentle hills of Pacific Palisades, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Highway. Joya lived in Florida with a small group of her devotees, the rest of us lived in communal houses in New York City, L.A., Berkeley and Boulder, Colorado. Every three months or so Joya would make the circuit, looping around the country to spent a week or so in residence with each of her groups. In between times she would hold weekly classes by conference call. I never knew what to expect in this classes. Sometimes the teachings were pure poetry, blinding white snows on mountaintops. Other times , for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what, if anything, was going on. The first time I noticed that something was indeed going on, was the very first time she looped the circuit and came to visit us in L.A. I had only seen her in the flesh once before, on the last day of the July retreat. It was now October and she was back for her first visit. She called us together for a kind of "debriefing," to talk about the house, how we were doing, and so on. We assembled in a downstairs bedroom, a dozen people sitting on the floor. When I entered, everyone was already in place. Joya was sitting in a relaxed cross-legged position on a mattress on the floor. A space was made for me directly in front of her. She was busily chatting away about various matters and eating grapes from a large bowl of fruit on her lap. She asked me how I was doing, was I having any problems, etc., and then, to my relief she forgot all about me and went on talking with the others. I just watched it all with avid curiosity. Within minutes however, something was up. Nobody said or did anything, nothing special happened, yet I began to become simply stoned. Outrageously stoned. Stoned to the bone. Deliciously intoxicated with the most subtle yet overwhelming feeling of drunken bliss. The very air seem saturated with sweetness, and the quiet act of breathing in and out of my heart took me deeper and deeper into it. I was intoxicated for hours. And through it all Joya just sat there eating grapes. Joya left the next day. But I was forever altered. For year afterwards this intoxication would come upon me, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes during sessions of formal meditation. I might be driving to work on the Santa Monica freeway on a workday morning, or sitting at my desk in the office, or just watching T.V., and that same bliss would begin to flow from my heart, turning my whole body soft with pleasure. Something was definitely up! Boot Camp Joya's retreat in Florida was known as "Kashi Ranch." It was a small compound outside of Vero Beach, at the time it consisted of one large house and one smaller one, a small artificial lake, with a small outdoor temple and a stable for half a dozen horses. At any given time, 40 or 50 people were there and the devotees from around the country prized the opportunity to visit. We would visit for a week or two of intensive spiritual practice. In the mornings, we did individual meditation or yoga, and did our chores. During the day Joya would sit outside in the sun with us, teaching and telling stories and just generally hanging out. In the evenings we would have formal class, with chanting, meditation and a talk on some spiritual topic. It's hard to describe the atmosphere of such a place. It is a retreat from the world, and a chance to work in depth in a highly-charged atmosphere. The last time I visited, I overheard someone on the plane home talking about how Elvis had died that week, and I felt like I had just left some kind of time-warp, in which the rest of the world had been humming along without my knowledge. Many, many exotic happenings occurred during these special visits. I will relate only one, because it illustrates just how much Joya knew and yet didn't know. During my last visit to Kashi Ranch Joya had organized daily yoga classes taught by her and segregated into a men's class, a women's class and then a combined class. Although Joya was in her early 40s, and I had never seen her do yoga before, she surprised me with her agility, she was far and away the master of this practice, despite being not so subtly challenged by some of our resident hotshots who had been doing yoga for years and who were rather proud of their skills. During men's class one day she had us sit around her in a circle and practice a certain esoteric breathing technique she wanted to teach us. It involved working with esoteric energies said to flow in the subtle body, energies which, when used properly, produce spiritual experiences. Sitting on either side of me were two of her most experienced, senior students. I was a rank beginner at the time and was notorious for being so timid that Joya almost never spoke to me for fear of scaring me to death. As I began to do the technique along with the group I noticed that the right and left sides of my body were being alternately affected by the breathing. First one side seemed to open and energy began to flow there, then the other side. As I continued, I found myself pulled toward a position of balance between my right and left sides. I don't mean physically pulled, but more like the energy became perfectly balanced between the left and right sides. When this happened I experienced a powerful sensation of balance, as if a strong energy field ran up my spine in a perfectly straight line. And when that point of balance was achieved, the most profound sensation of peace came over me. I was in an instant more serene than I had ever been. The feeling was so powerful that I felt I could sit like that forever and never want for anything again. Joya, had her back to our side of the circle but she immediately whirled around, and with a puzzled look on her face, looked in our direction. She hesitated for a moment and then asked the student to the left of me what he was experiencing. He replied that nothing was happening for him. This caused her to look even more puzzled. She started to turn around, but stopped midway and turned again to face us. This time she asked the student to my right what he was experiencing and he too said not much of anything. Again, Joya looked puzzled and again she started to turn around again. While this was all going on, my mind begin to chatter, "It's ME! My god, this is amazing! Wow! I can't believe this!" As soon as these thoughts started they pulled me off center somehow, the balance was lost, and the feeling of profound peace dropped away. The Group During my L.A. years a friend of a friend decided to organize a small meditation group, to meet one day a week at her apartment for cheese and crackers, conversation, and a brief group meditation. She had apparently undergone a mediumistic opening and had begun to "channel" communications from wherever such communications come from. The group lasted about four months before I was asked to leave, for conduct unbecoming a meditator. But during that time, some intriguing events took place. One lovely summer evening we assembled in her apartment for our weekly session. She guided the meditation by the simple instruction to go into our heart and open to whatever might occur. Her model was that various spiritual beings would commune with us in some way. Yet as I meditated, I found a very non-personal feeling descending upon me. I found myself bathed in an atmosphere of the most sublime love, which seemed to pour over me like a very subtle mist. It was love of a purity so fine, and so fundamental, that afterwards I found myself thinking that this was what God must be. Simple, pure love. I seemed to have been blessed to touch it just briefly, just to sort of know it was really there. Macro Balance My two years with Joya were the most exotic years of my life. There were ancient Hindu rituals and nights around the lake, the bonfires painting the night sky in burnt oranges and reds, Sanskrit chants filling the crackling air. There were teachings of exquisite beauty, esoteric and mysterious. There were the excitements and frictions of communal life. There were moments of richness and moments of challenge and confusion. And through it all there was Joya, extravagant and flamboyant, the most extreme human being I have ever met. At times I feared her, as some unknown mystery, half-mad, dark and powerful. At times I loved her with all the gentleness my heart has ever known. I have looked into her eyes inadvertently and felt a start and a flush of embarrassment at the radiant, open beauty I saw there. And I have looked into those eyes and seen no one looking back, just some ancient, weary presence reflected there. Times there were when I sat at her side, my head resting on the back of her hand, soft pleasure flowing from my heart, coursing through my limbs and issuing from my forehead, temples and crown. Times when to simply be in the same room was occasion for the most exquisite intoxication, when my whole body was steeped and made groggy by joy. Then too, there were stretches of doubt and fear, opportunities for guilt and confusion. Never comfortably sure. Always off balance. Eventually, I left the group and never saw Joya again. My life was out of balance. Just as I had once been obsessed with the left-brain frenzy of a hyperkenetic scientism, now I was too far to the other extreme, seeing myself as ash-marked spiritual seeker, with disdain for all worldly matters. I was now listing too far to the right brain, or trying to anyway. Somehow I needed to regain a better balance. I needed to become more worldly. The Taoists tell us that balance is the key to wisdom. Unfortunately, I seem incapable of realizing a balanced life all at once, I seem only to be able to do it over geological time. As I look at the patterns and rhythms of my life I seem to shift gears dramatically about every seven years or so. Taken together, these periods balance each other rather nicely. I just wish I could manage to find that balance in shorter epochs. Coming Full Circle It has now been more than a decade since the last events described in this little tale. During the intervening time I have gotten married, my career has blossomed, and I stopped doing any kind of spiritual practice, concentrating instead on worldly matters, as worldly as I could find anyway. Putting the last couple of decades together, the balance seems agreeable. Only in the last few years have I resumed my spiritual practice. I am hoping that this will not simply be the start of a new seven-year phase, but might instead, be the start of a simple, well-balanced life. We shall have to see. The Moral Of Our Tale Most good stories have a moral or two, to add a little spice. I offer the following. I have discovered that one can live this life on the mud of earth in various states of mind, and these states of mind are very nearly entirely matters of choice. One can be angry or depressed or fearful, of course, but one can also be groggy with joy, drunk on the bliss that pours from the heart. States in which the heart melts and quiet pleasure radiates through the body/mind are not poetic metaphors, they are actual, presently available ways of being in the world. There are lots of good excuses to avoid such simple truth. I know and practice them all. But I have also discovered that whenever I manage to let go of the excuse of the moment, I tend spontaneously to fall into the pool of my heart. As if our natural rest-state condition is bliss, which we only manage to avoid by clinging frantically to whatever distractions we can lay our hands on. I have also felt once or twice a depth of love of such purity, which touched me in a place so close to who I am, that the only word I can find to hang on it is 'God.' It has become simply apparent to me that there is God in the universe, and that God is here and now knowable. That's all. |