The Invitation to Transformation

Gideon, got to thinking this morning about your contention that you couldn’t see how a garden variety, post adolescent, existential crisis led me to drop out of college to study Zen with Mr. Rose when so many kids go through the same thing and don’t act on it. I immediately thought of a couple of stories that happened before I met Rose that may shed light. I decided to write them down before they fade, and see if you think they add anything to unraveling this mystery. But first a little philosophy if you’ll bear with me.

One important point I am trying to make is that most so-called spiritual paths are not really transformative and therefore not really spiritual. Instead they are merely belief structures the ego uses to buffer itself against apparent meaninglessness. A sense of meaninglessness that is unavoidable in a creature that both longs for life and is aware that it must die. Most religious paths are little more than the ego “whistling past the grave yard” as it tries to keep the chaos at bay long enough to get through life. In this sense most religion is symptomatic of resignation not transformation, and, by the way, atheistic humanistic belief structures drink from the same resignation and provide the same psychological crutch.

This book, masked as narrative, is an Either/Or critique of the Both/And morass of today’s relativistic spirituality. It is inclusive in that it is non-denominational and pluralistic, yet it is exclusive and even elitist because I insist there are valid and invalid approaches to spirituality. This book is a tiny step toward a new paradigm of orthodoxy that is equally inimical to both the New Age and fundamentalism. My dogmatic assertion is that valid spirituality is transformative and invalid regressive.

Authentic spirituality undermines everything. As Thomas Merton said, “Dread is realizing that everything you depend on could possibly fail you.” Authentic spirituality is not a buffer: it is war against buffers. It is a counter-intuitive journey into dread where the ego is stretched to the breaking point by our desire for, and intuitive belief in, “something more” and our fear that this intuition is either wishful thinking or that, while there may be “something more” for a Buddha or Moses, we ourselves are not up to the task.

In this context the greatest spiritual dread is what I alluded to in my essay Brother John: we progress far enough into spirituality to “see through” life’s illusions, far enough to be irrevocably cut off from normalcy, but not far enough to break through to the “other side” — assuming there IS an “other side”.

Commitment to a spiritual path is analogous to a caterpillar in a cocoon. Once the caterpillar is committed it transforms or dies. Either/Or. But how can it be sure it will transform and not die in its dark limbo — no longer caterpillar and yet not quite butterfly? It is fear of this meaningless and dreadful limbo where we find ourselves without either God or man that is most daunting. Yet this is the essential movement — a movement into the tension between the “Great Faith and Great Doubt,” a movement that creates the essential energy, the pressure that cracks the ego. This Either/Or journey is into the Unknown because we have no more knowledge of what this “something more” is really like than a caterpillar has of butterfliness.

The Spiritual Path

Spirituality is like a man who goes looking for the spring of Eternal Life — a wonderful oasis out in the desert that sages say is a hundred miles away. When he gets fifty miles out he realizes he has fifty miles of water left. If he keeps going and the oasis turns out to be legend or mirage he won’t have water for the return journey. If he goes back he knows he will be haunted the rest of his life by his lack of faith and the missed opportunity. What to do?

For most of us the answer is to never set out in the first place. Stay home and retreat into the distractions of everyday living. Read books and watch movies about other people taking such risks instead. (Our insatiable appetite for such “drama,” which by definition concerns people at the edge forced to make decisions that reveal who they really are, proves that we long for this revelation as well.)

As a result, the tragedy of life is we live merely vicariously. Even those who say they are on a spiritual quest usually reject the Either/Or nature of authentic spirituality and desperately hedge — holding onto normal life with one hand, reaching for God with the other, and rationalizing it all away as a “balanced life.” Both/And. They refuse to burn their bridges and reject the necessity to do so, and in the process short circuit the magical tension that an Either/Or approach generates.

Both/And spirituality is a pyramid scheme seductively offering to make us all spiritual zillionaires while keeping our day jobs. It’s “Eat anything and still lose weight!” spirituality, and is just as spurious. Yet life itself is a journey out into the desert. We are committed by birth to an Either/Or, life and death struggle. We just don’t realize it. We are born with only so much water – water called breath – and we must make crucial decisions or life makes them for us. Life will eventually expose us to ourselves and our only hope is to accelerate the process and find out in time.

My father died recently at 86. A once vibrant, successful man with eight children who couldn’t find the hours in the day for all his interests, he spent his last years unable to sleep, taking anti-depressants… sitting… thinking. As he was an intensely private man, I hesitated before asking one day what he was thinking about for hours… all alone… day after day. “My life. My regrets.” he said softly. I didn’t have the heart to probe further.

People don’t consciously realize what is at stake but something deep inside does, and that’s why we feel so empty: we are failing to accept the invitation to really live. We don’t realize being born human means we are already not merely caterpillar, and if we don’t accept the invitation to transformation we are doomed to live vicariously — stuck in this meta-cocoon called life ambivalent and divided against ourselves. I am convinced that whatever my father would proximately have blamed for his “regrets” his failure to accept life’s invitation to transformation was his real regret. As Fr. Christian says, “Even the boy banging on the brothel door is really looking for God.”

Our bulwark against this scary dilemma, the bulwark that keeps us from realizing we are actually standing on nothing but Kierkegaard’s famous “40,000 fathoms of water” is what psychologists call “repression” or “denial.” Almost every human activity from trivial distraction to the loftiest philosophy is really nothing but the ego’s desperate attempt to keep this repressive wall intact, the nightmare buffered and at bay. Authentic spirituality is facing the nightmare and realizing that what we think is nightmare is really T.S. Eliot’s “darkness of God.”

But enough philosophy. The reason I got off my duff and headed toward Rose is that a series of shocks perforated the membrane of my repressive mechanism. Through a glass darkly I got a glimpse of what is really at stake. I intuited, again darkly, that as a human being I was committed at conception and that my current situation as part caterpillar/ part butterfly was not only untenable but a prescription for life as Neither/Nor, a life of vacillation and ambivalence, a life of agony.

Of course I continued to vacillate in my semi-blindness even after I started working with Rose. This is natural. The journey is from Both/And to Either/Or and we all vacillate until we arrive. At times I longed to get back to the womb, back to the animal state where everything is spontaneous, obvious, taken for granted.

Vertigo

At other times I tried to just live with my condition through resignation — just count my blessings and use distraction to push the problem from my mind. At still others I desperately tried to hedge and live the fabulous “balanced life:” be a caterpillar Monday through Saturday and dream of butterflies on Sunday.

But the shocks that had perforated my repressive mechanism ultimately doomed these alternate approaches. All of my attempts to “get back to the way things were” and “get with it” were ultimately futile. I probed the hole in my defenses trying to heal or at least understand and only made it bigger. I had no more choice than a tongue with a sore tooth, and what made Rose such a remarkable teacher is that he stuck his fist and eventually his head into my soul-hole tearing it wider.

Before I knew what was happening I was irretrievably committed. I had naively started toying with a girl named Sophia only to wake up one day in love, and as is usually the case in affairs of the heart, I was the last to know and it was too late to do anything about it.

The rest of my spiritual journey was little more than an intense struggle against ongoing vacillation — the continual temptation to turn back and rejoin the “herd.” Sometimes I gave in and turned back cursing my vanity and pretensions to godhood. Then I’d return to spirituality cursing my weakness and the wasted time. Eventually I repeated this exercise — often in a single day or even a single moment — so many times that it felt like I’d been doing nothing for years but wandering aimlessly in circles in the desert, like a modern Israelite.

I no longer knew forward from back, and every time I looked in the mirror there was a little less water in the canteen. Then one day the water ran out. God was non-existent, indifferent, or beyond me, and I’d forgotten the way back to men. I was hopelessly lost, in over my head, and beyond my strength, and I sank to the ground in despair only to find I’d been standing in the Oasis the whole time. Such is surrender and the rest is gratitude, boundless gratitude.

The spiritual path is not a collection of diets, meditation techniques, and weekend workshops that we dabble in during our spare time to smooth out the rough spots. It is a commitment to real life decisions that produces a counter-intuitive journey into estrangement, alienation, and increasing disorientation. A process I call “spiritual vertigo.” Vertigo is the necessary ingredient and its disorienting qualities create the space between our defense mechanisms that lets in the sun. Spirituality is a journey into confusion powered by an abhorrence for confusion where we play “over our heads” most of the time.

But before I recount the actual shocks that I think perforated my repressive membrane I must make a final point. Everything I’ve written so far is about negative motivation. But there was an incredible sense of possibility that the hole in my defense mechanism revealed as well. There was something wonderful, something magical all around and just out of reach. Something that goaded me and maddened me as it filled my nostrils and collected on the tip of my tongue without ever revealing itself. This magnetic attraction had the pull of a million suns and to this day it beggars my ability to describe it and this aphasia is the heart break of my life. Because I’m convinced that if I could describe it, if I could convey it, I could take my place among the Magi bearing my priceless gift to a helpless God-child mistaken by so many for merely a godless and godforsaken world.

Zen and Catholicism

Here are my musings on the shocks that opened me up.

First of all, there were childhood incidents and dreams suggesting I was, to some extent, always open. But at 14, after a successful childhood as something of a hot shot, I won a scholarship to an exclusive New England boarding school. I went and promptly failed at everything and graduated only by the grace of god and the skin of my teeth. These failures drove me for the first time to introspection. I spent three years in agony engrossed in what I call my “Superiority/Inferiority complex:” sometimes I was failing because I was too good for the school and at others because I was just not good enough. These years rocked my little world and to this day I give money because Hotchkiss not only kicked my ass but, for reasons known only to God, didn’t kick me out. But most of all I am grateful to my parents. If they hadn’t cut off my retreat I would’ve escaped the fiery furnace by retreating to my little comfort zone just outside Pittsburgh. Unable to succeed and unable to quit, this was my first Either/Or experience with the red-hot cannonball of Zen stuck in my throat, and the pressure this generated blew my mind and was critical to my development.

While at Hotchkiss a close friend, an atheist, created a wonderful logical mouse trap that undermined my Catholic faith. This turn away from Catholicism and toward atheism eventually took a greater toll than I realized, widening that hole that had to be filled.

Second: Drugs. My brief love affair with LSD produced transcendent raptures and unfathomable hells. My last trip was so bad I experienced anxiety and panic attacks for six months as well as agoraphobic episodes. I was too ashamed to tell anyone about these episodes and eventually they tapered off and went away, but I now know they were directly related to an ego too immature to see what it saw.

But there were also two seminal incidents before I met Rose that led to my decision to become a seeker. Like LSD these shocks were chock full of that horror and promise that accompanies all revelation. (This horror and promise is captured neatly in the word “awful” which means both “terrible” and “full of awe.”

Philosophical Discussion

While a student at the University of Pittsburgh I moved into a large house with four of my friends. One day I was home alone when there was a knock at the door. The knocker introduced himself as Jay Becker and he was looking for his younger brother Tommy. Tommy was out with the other guys, but as they were expected back I invited him in to wait. Jay was a good looking guy, blonde, six foot tall, and about thirty. He had never gone to college, and he told me he owned the parking concession for a couple of Pittsburgh’s best restaurants.

I don’t remember how but we soon fell into a deep philosophical discussion. Suddenly he got up from the couch and began pacing up and down the living room floor. He must’ve paced silently for five minutes deeply agitated. Finally he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to me.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said in a voice full of so much intensity he scared me. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife.”

He made a few more turns across the floor.

“Like I said I park cars for a living,” he said still pacing. “I pay guys to chase cars and collect tips. They work by the hour and I keep the difference. One night some guy stuck a gun in my ribs and before I could give him my cash he pulled the trigger.”

Life after Death

He then went on to describe what has now become a text book life after death experience except this was years before Kubler-Ross and Moody released their seminal work on the subject. He watched the medical team working on him from the ceiling of the O.R., heard them screaming, “We’re losing him, we’re losing him” and made the journey through the tunnel toward a white light calling him “home.” But just before he merged, the light reminded him of unfinished business and sent him back. He later learned he had died on the operating table, and that every detail he had witnessed from the O.R. ceiling had actually transpired.

Talk about shock and awe. I didn’t say a word. I don’t know whether I was more moved by his incredible story or by his remarkable transformation. In the course of a few minutes he had gone from a relaxed, affable, blue collar kind of guy to a burning bush enveloped in a fire that raged without consuming.

After his story he paced silently for a few more minutes. When he turned again his intense look of fixed purpose had been replaced by so much anguish that I was drawn and repelled at the same time.

“What am I supposed to do?” he screamed. “I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here. If I could only tell you what it was like… nothing matters anymore… except God….”

And then as if amazed at what had popped from his mouth, his voice trailed off to a whisper “Except God…” and he sat down in a chair and wept.

I’d like to say I comforted him or tried to, but I didn’t. I just sat there stunned and horrified.

Finally he looked up and said, “The hardest part is I can’t tell anyone. Who’d believe me? They’d say I’m nuts. I can’t even tell my wife.”

I don’t remember anything else, but I didn’t think he was nuts. I believed every word. I couldn’t help myself. This incident shook me to my core. Despite his agony or because of it, I was overwhelmed with a sense of beauty and wonder. But most of all I was shaken by the fact that Jay had chosen me, a kid, a perfect stranger, someone he’d met only minutes before, for his terrible secret. I felt blessed, chosen somehow. This was not an accident. Jay had been sent. I was supposed to do something. But like him I didn’t know what. And though his brother and I remained friends for several years, I told no one and never saw Jay again.

Poker

Charlie was a bus driver and with his wife and two children moved into the house next door to my parents. Though he was 29, ten years older than me, we became friendly. One day he knocked on the door and asked me to play poker with him and a couple of his bus driver friends. I’m not much for poker but I was flattered and agreed to sit in. Almost immediately something strange started to happen. I won every hand. I mean every hand. The mood at the table turned ominous. Charlie’s friends made it clear that I was not quitting with all the chips, and while I don’t want to say they thought I was cheating, they were also plainly put out. They changed dealers and decks, moved me to different seats, but still I won. I was in a panic. The stakes were small, I didn’t like what was happening to the game, and so I tried to lose. And of course I won. Finally, they were all playing “poverty,” a house rule that allowed them to continue playing without chips, and with nothing more to win I became bored. Only then did I lose.

When I had given back enough to make them happy the game broke up. It is difficult to describe my mental state. It was an altered state, I felt just a tad off, and everything was shimmering a bit. It was trippy, but not unpleasant, and whether my mental state caused my run of luck or my run of luck was caused by my mental state, I can’t say.

Anyway, after the game I sat down on the sofa with one of Charlie’s friends. He was a bloated, unhealthy looking guy in his early thirties, woefully out of shape and with a face already ravaged by drinking.

He was a Vietnam veteran, and for an hour he riveted me with one gut wrenching story of combat after another. Then his tour ended when a mortar round hit the edge of his foxhole. When he woke up in the hospital he was deaf and blind, and he described what it was like to live for weeks deaf, blind, and terrified before he finally began to recover.

He told me all this in an artless matter of fact way. There was no bravado, in fact I think what made his story particularly remarkable was the utter lack of emotion. If anything there was a detached dreaminess, a blank coldness, as if he was talking about someone else or an article from the newspaper. When he finished he turned away, picked up his can of beer and sat staring at it for a while. Then he took a long pull and turned back.

‘I miss Vietnam,” he whispered hoarsely his eyes burning. “I’d go back tomorrow if they’d have me.”

He waited for my stunned reaction to settle into my face…. “You don’t get it do you?” he laughed wryly. “Listen, I was alive in ‘Nam man. There’s no gray, no bullshit, just you, your buddies, stayin’ alive. That’s it man. People talk about intimacy, trust, love… Bull shit! They’re already dead and don’t know it. You want intimacy? You want trust? — go to ‘Nam man, go to ‘Nam. Guys who know… one heartbeat… hangin’ their asses out every fuckin’ minute of every fuckin’ day provin’ it. And I was one of them man, I was one of them. There’s only one fucking thing in ‘Nam man, and every fucking thing is that fucking thing, no hesitation, no doubts, just a single point of intensity called life, and when you’re livin’ that you’re there man, you’re alive man, and you know what life’s supposed to be… this,” he said waving his arm at the room, “this is nothin’ but bull shit.”

He looked away staring down at his beer can as he fondled it.

“So look at me now.” He went on shaking his head without looking up. “I’m a bus driver with a wife who loves me. Yeah, she loves me alright,” he said bitterly, “she loves me so much she’s sendin’ me to beautician school so we can open a beauty parlor. A fuckin’ beauty parlor for Chrissake. But the jokes on her man… the jokes on her… she don’t know it but I’ve been dead for years. I died in ‘Nam man, they just shipped me home without my body bag.”

And without another word he drained the can, hoisted himself out of his seat, and lumbered out the door.

I just sat there until, with a start of embarrassment, I realized I was the only one left and overstaying my welcome. Then I got up, went out the same door, and went looking for Rose.

Shock

Postscript: Many years later I met another vet, a Green Beret, who lied about his age and joined the army at 17. He told me more or less the same story of horror co-mingled with nostalgia for ‘Nam. He put it this way:

“When I recovered from my wounds they sent me home. Everything was the same and nothing was the same. My family, my friends, everybody was in slow motion, zombies in lock step, more dead than alive. There was nothing but people trying to impress their peers or attract the opposite sex. I couldn’t stand it; I was either going to shoot somebody or myself so I decided I could open a brothel in Bangkok, become a mercenary, or figure it all out. I decided to figure it all out and that’s how I discovered Zen.”

We all eventually receive some kind of shock that opens us up, shows us what we’re missing and the price that authentic living requires. What differentiates us is what we do with it. In his frustration and sense of loss the first vet chose bitterness, blame, beer. The second went looking for answers. I did too.

“Like I said I park cars for a living,” he said still pacing. “I pay guys to chase cars and collect tips. They work by the hour and I keep the difference. One night some guy stuck a gun in my ribs and before I could give him my cash he pulled the trigger.”