A short story (personal narrative) by Robert Slothus
Scene location: a B & B grand dining room. Twelve people are sitting at an enormous Victorian table having dinner
Principle Characters: Jens Castle part owner of the B & B, Richard Myers an unexpected guest, Joel Grasson, M.D. and Rick Cheetham, Jens’ close friends
Minor Characters: Malcom Campbell, Jens friend, Beth Snyder, Jens’ partner, Jason Zanner, Beth’s friend, Sue Cheetham, Rick's wife, Marguerite Depaul, part owner of a French restaurant across the street from the B & B
Title: What Channel Do You Have On: or - it's not an either or but an and also
Sue asks this guest, “Mr. Myers, what do you do?"
There was stoned cold silence at the table. Jens thought Malcom's jaw was going to drop. He knew Malcom had an aversion to hearing that type of direct questioning. He thought people should be more polished when they asked questions at a formal dinner. Jens remembered Malcom saying “what one does for a living is one’s own business and some people like to keep it that way.”
Up to that point, Richard Myers had sat quietly at the great manor table eating a gourmet meal listening to some very eccentric people revealing intimate stories. Now, his face seemed to lighten up and Jens could sense he wanted to say something; something he thought to be important. After finishing his last piece of grouper, the unexpected guest that Jens invited to join the twelve for dinner began to open up.
"Let’s see, I taught Psychology for a while." He took a sip of wine.
"Where abouts" asked Sue.
"Harvard mostly, but I did some research and guest lecturing at Columbia."
"I was at NYU for a few years," Dr. Grasson said, "did some consulting at Columbia; Columbia… that's a fine school. Did you know a David Hirsch. He was in the department of psychiatry there?"
"Yes, I did. Actually, he and I co-authored a paper together back in 68; that was just before I went to India for the first time. You know, Sue, your question reminds me of story I once heard while I was in Cairo studying Sufism."
"What ism?" Sue replied.
"Suffism, a mystical sect of the Muslim Religion; very strange and wonderful stuff. The Suffists got allot of what I like to call 'crazy wisdom'. You see, I got a summer fellowship back in 69, thanks to Tim Leary, and had this great opportunity to study with these clerics in Cairo. When I first met these men I swear I thought they were all on LSD or something, anyway, you see, they told me about this fellow named Vas Rooten; he may have had other names but that's not important."
Sue had a kind of wine induced glazed look over her eyes now. That didn't matter to Richard Myers, he sensed everyone was listening and continued.
"It seems that one day Vas Rooten walked into a bank to cash a check. It was a large check and the teller looked at the check, the check looked alright....then he looked at Vas Rooten again. Now Vas Rooten was somewhat of a disreputable looking kind of character and the teller asked if he could identify himself. Vas Rooten thought for a moment then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a mirror and looked into it... 'YEP!’ he declared. That's me."
Everyone laughed.
"Now isn't it interesting how subtle yet formal our identities are and how much we are attached to them.....our cards of identity I call them. My name, social security number, address, zip code, occupation; the whole set of labels that define who we think we are. For instance, when we are born, shortly after birth we go into somebody training, we start to become somebody. We are trained by other people who know who they are and they are going to teach us who we are. They mean well of course. They do this so we can function in the world by being somebody. Because of all this you see, you become daddy's little boy or girl, somebody that eats all his broccoli. You begin to develop an identity after a while. You’re good or bad or you’re a precocious little snot."
Jason leaned over and whispered into Beth's ear, "This is some real crazzzzy wisdom alright!" "Stop thaaaat," she replied in a forceful tone. She rolled her eyes backwards and sighed, "I need more wine."
Rick spoke up… "My parents bought me a stethoscope when I was in fifth grade. A doctor was what they wanted me to be. I got Bio and Chem books and microscopes for Christmas and they always patted me on the head, 'you'll love taking care of the sick,' they told me."
"Exactly," said Richard Myers, "they kept reinforcing the idea."
"Yea, but once I was in college and started flunking histology and cytology they saw I wasn't cut out for it…I was a pretty stinky little snot when I was a kid."
"Still are, stinky that is," Dr. Grasson said with a smile.
There was more laughter.
Richard Myers continued, "But you see, we carry our somebodyness around with us and it allows us to be with other people in a very efficient way."
"You’re a Doctor; right?" Asked Sue.
"I once was a professor of psychology. I've talked way too much, I am sorry. You don't really want to hear about my theories tonight, this is your gathering, your special night; isn't that right Jens? I 'am monopolizing the conversation."
"Once were?" Jens asked.
"Yes that's right. I don't teach in the classroom anymore. Now I just go around different places and give talks; meaningful ones I hope."
"I think all of us here really want to hear more about this crazy wisdom you're talking about; am I right?” Jens asked the group.
There were no objections from anyone.
“Well then if you insist. I like to use metaphors a lot when I talk, it allows me to kind of jump across different systems easily; if we can all talk the same language for a while it helps to see it a little better."
Another three bottles of wine were passed around and they sat and listened.
"Now, let’s pretend that there is a remote control TV channel selector stuck to the side of your head and you set the selector to channel one. Through your eyes now you see man, women, old, young, thin, fat, dark, light...physical entities. Endomorphs, ectomorphs and mesomorphs if you’re a scientist. If you were full of lust you would be on this channel, you would see everybody as bodies as if they would fulfill your fantasies. You would see there's a potential, there's a competitor and that one over there, and he’s irrelevant. That's the physical plane. You see everybody as one of those three categories.
Now switch to channel two, you see happy, sad, seeker, responsible, laid back, teacher, mother, child, doctor, judge, lawyer, politician...you see all the social roles. You see all the psychological social dimensions. If you’re in psychotherapy this is the real channel; nothing else is real. Channel two is our story line, most of our cards of identity are in those two channels. Channel two is our psychological story line. It's the world turns...where am I going, where did I come from, will I make it! Am I lousing it up, if I can only get over this. I guess in channel two I am a warm, affable intelligent teacher.
Channel three is the new age channel...Scorpio! In channel three there are only as many as you see in a group. It's our mythical channel...it's the archetypes. I am the Buddha giving a sermon in the deer park. I am a seeker of the Holy Grail. We have these bigger mythic roles also besides our mere paltry psychological roles...bigger games are being played out.
You see, these first three channels are all, what I like to call, matrices of individual differences...ways we can peg one another. In channel three I am a Sagittarius. The astro plane explains everything. Switch to channel four. Now you look into the eyes of a human being and see another being just like you looking back at you. 'Are you in there?
I am in here! How did you get in that one?' Farrrr outttttttt!!! And what you see at that moment is another awareness just like you but packaged differently. And then you see channels one, two, three as packaging. And this channel, channel four, in Christianity it's called the soul, the eyes are the windows to the soul... right? So you see another soul just like you but this soul is having an entirely different set of life experiences. Because they are packaged differently you see how much the package affects what these experiences are all about. The package includes all the desires, fear, hopes, social perceptions...you see, if we are in channel one, we are in this room, in Williamstown, in a wonderful grand home. But on channel four we are a group of souls sharing a moment and thinking little about what we are doing on earth. The time and space of this is just incidental to the forms we have to be meeting in.
Let’s flip to channel five. In channel five it is though there're two mirrors facing one another. You see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself. In channel five there is only one of us. 'Oh Israel the lord thy God is One'. The world is one, not one plus Sally. So from channel five we are one in drag or one at play. If you are in the 'one' on channel five, 'well what will I do today?' you wouldn't say today because you're not into today, you would say 'I think I'll become the many! I think I'll play hide and seek.' Then you would bring your awareness down and you go into some of it and then you look out at the rest and you go 'oh God it's scary' you see others as them and then you get all scared and say 'all ye all ye in free' and you come back into the one. Pretty heavy huh! I don't think I'll play that again."
"Cooool," Sue exclaimed.
"So from channel five we are the one at play and just to keep the Buddhists happy we flip to channel six where you disappear, I disappear, the channel selector disappears...none of it is or was...it's all void. Now we have a system to play with. Now when I talk about you being born and going into somebody training the somebody training you specifically went into was primarily channels one and two. And the anxiety that was attended to the way in which you started to become somebody...let me point out that when you are born you’re not being busy being separate...it's all one to you...it's all one undifferentiated thing. Then something along the way comes and you start to see that you are not all of it."
"What was it for you?" Sue asked.
"I've got a suspicion that my critical moment was when I bit my mother's breast and she said ...'that's not yours! That's mine! She pushed me away. There was something that happened that all of a sudden I had a sense that I fell out of grace. I was no longer at home in the universe; I was a separate entity. But I had yearnings to get back...I suck, I eat, I grab, I want, I try to incorporate, I try to get back into the one. I am now a separate entity. I learned separateness along the way. I bought into my separateness. And the emotional loading with which we do that means that you get very concerned with who you are, your identity. And in order to be functional in the world as a separate entity, to survive...because you begin to feel that there is this vast power around you. You begin to experience impedance, inadequacy...whatever the roots of human neuroses are. You develop a sense of separateness and there is this vastness and you are always trying to make it alright; to come back in. Whether you come back in through eating, collecting, through your eyes, drawing in through achievements, sexuality. You're always trying to come back into the one, into the unity, into the feeling of being in the Tao, in the harmony of things instead of being separate."
"And the most powerful vehicle you have on channel two for developing your separateness and your computer system for functioning efficiently as a separate entity where I am me and you are you is your thinking mind.
The conceptual mind, the thinking mind is very addicting because it gives you power. The thinking mind puts us on the moon...the thinking mind gives us technology...so much stuff. I grew up studying Latin and learned cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am! Meaning you are an identity with your thinking mind... 'I am the thinker'."
"That thinking mind sometimes can get us into some trouble," said Dr. Grasson.
"It certainly can," Richard Myers fired back.
"Think about this for a moment. When you got up this morning, from the moment you woke up you started to think things like...I got to go to the bathroom...I could sleep another five minutes...It's warm in that corner of the bed...got to do the laundry...boy I am so sleepy...what was I dreaming about? Got to go to the bathroom! On and on it goes just like a trip hammer. Each thought in your mind coming forth. Each one saying 'think of me think of me, I am real' brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr and so on. It's like that story of the drunk looking for his watch under a street lamp and somebody comes along to help him and the fellow asks him were exactly did you lose it and the drunk says 'down that alley'. Well then why are we looking here? Because there is light here! That's the situation that you end up studying what the human mind can know as an object. And everything that it can't is irrelevant. It turns out that most of what we are could be considered in the category irrelevant."
"Most people spend their entire lives with an identity in channels one and two. It's as if they created a room for themselves with their mind of who I am and what is me and what is not me and how it all is and then no matter how miserable they are in this room they will never step out of it.
Now if as is the case for most people...that need of that separateness to be sure where it is and how it is and whether you are my friend or my enemy and who can I get what from and is it safe and where do I go and where don't go...this map built from the place of my separateness. I am so attached to those identities on channels one and two that all the information that comes to me from channels three, four, five and six I, in effect, reject. I know, you're all thinking I took to many drugs in the sixties!"
"Nothing wrong with that," Rick exclaimed.
"Let’s just assume that the information is coming in on every one of these channels as to who you are. But you are so attached to channels one and two that the other information on these other channels you treat differently. You use words like irrelevant or error or I was out of my mind, or I was spaced out, or I am losing it or I just don't know what just happened. It was like when I took the mushroom psilocybin for the first time and I had these experiences. I experienced that I was perfect. That I was part of the universe and I was perfect...'well I know I am not perfect says channel one and two.' So what I do in order to preserve my model of myself, which is certainly inadequate and not perfect, is I say of that experience 'interesting hallucination!"
There was more laughter.
"You see I have a label for it, I call it a reductionistic label, it's a label that makes it less important...it's not real. My father use to say 'come down to reality,' which meant; get a job...get your act together. As William James said in 1906, he said 'are normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it parted by it from the filmiest of screens there may lay other types of consciousness. We may spend our entire lives without knowing of their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and there they are in their completeness. Their existence forbids our premature closing of our accounts with reality.' But most of us do. We say this is reality and all the rest of this is la la land! It's playing...it's out there somewhere. But somewhere along the line for some people in some birth there is what's called awakening. What awakening is, is that you acknowledge that channels three, four, five and six, specifically four, five and six have some reality to them. You allow that they are potentially real which means that channels one and two which previously you were treating as absolutely real are only relatively real. So what you've done in that moment is you've done to your social perception what Einstein did to Newtonian physics."
"Run that by me again," Rick asked.
"You and I both learned Newtonian physics; right? Newton said this is absolute truth, didn't he? Then Einstein comes along and said it depends upon where you're standing. He just shifted from absolute to relative reality."
Rick looked at Jens, 'this guy is unbelievable'. Sue was mesmerized, Grasson sat there looking as though he was in the presence of the Mahatma. Jens too looked impressed and happy Richard Myers decided to ring the door bell and ask to stay the night.
Jens turned away for a moment and saw Marguerite, she had come in through the back porch door into the kitchen and was standing in the doorway to the dining room staring at him. Richard Myers noticed her and paused for a moment. She quietly stood there until Jens acknowledge her presence and asked her into the room.
"Hi everybody," she said in an upbeat manner.
"I think you know everyone here except for this gentleman; Richard Myers...I'd like you to meet Marguerite Depaul," Jens said in a formal sounding way.
"Hi," she replied.
"How do you do."
“Dr. Myers was just talking about his experiences with...Hummmm, how should I put it?" Jens said.
"Perceptions," Rick blurted out.
"I think it's more like mindfulness," Dr. Grasson said.
"You're both correct. These wonderful people are very obliging; letting me tell them about my passion in life," Richard Myers said to Marguerite.
"Passion, that's something you can never have enough of. Please, don't let me stop you it sounds interesting."
"Yes, you were talking about relatively," Sue said quickly.
"Passion is finite!' Jens said as he looked into Marguerite's eyes.
"Only if you forget how important it is," Marguerite replied.
All of a sudden, the room filled up with a kind of electromagnetic energy, everyone could sense that those last comments made by Marguerite and Jens to one another had a lot more underlying meaning to them then just personal insight into the human condition. Marguerite was letting Jens know, in no uncertain terms, that he did not have to settle for anything less than what he wanted. After their brief but insightful conversation earlier in the day, she felt a selfish desire come over her and decided to crash the gathering and see what Jens was up to. She had been drinking at the resturant and walked over after closing up. She was being direct which indicated to Jens that she certainly wanted something.
Sensing that she was being too obvious and bringing on too much attention to herself, she sat down next to Jens and looked up at Richard Myers.
"So Einstein shifted from absolute to relative reality! Now how that awakening occurs for any individual is as varied as there are individuals. When you're ripe for that awakening a leaf can fall or who knows...it just happens. Back in the sixties I was part of a group of people who all awakened through 'better living through chemistry' and we would have these group meetings which were 'you know... I know, we just kind of reassured each other that we all knew. We all identified the experience we were having with our method. The club members all looked the same, they all dressed the same way. They all wore white and smiled a lot and had flowers...they all knew. There was a lot of repressed aggression! At one lecture I was giving at the club I noticed this lady sitting in the front row wearing a printed dress, a hat and on her feet, very responsible looking oxfords. And I would say these things that only 'we' would understand and she would move her head up and down and twitch around in her seat and I became aware of her and I asked myself, 'how does she know?'...she's not an acid head. Then I asked something really esoteric of the group which only the people who were playing out on channels five and six would even think relevant, and she would again acknowledge that she knew what I was talking about in a nonverbal kind of body movement. I thought she had a nervous twitch or something. But she would do this only when I made a point. So at the end of my lecture I smiled at her and she came over and said 'that was just right, that's just how I understood it to be'.
'How do you know? What have you done that has allowed you to understand these things we have been talking about,' I asked her. She leaned over to me very conspiratorially and said, 'I crochet!'"
The dining room erupted with laughter and Richard Myers smiled broadly.
"And at that moment I realized the game was not what I thought it was. You see, because until then, I always identified or rationalized the method of getting somewhere...where you got...with your method of getting there! What happens to all of us is that if your method is crocheting, you cannot understand why everyone is not crocheting! Crocheting is the only way! If you do it through Zen sitting, you feel so sorry for the poor slob who doesn't sit. If it's sex...you mean you're celibate? It's inconceivable that someone would throw away the ecstasy of transcendence! But yet you look around and people arrive at that by a tremendous variety of ways. And when you can separate the method from where the method takes you can see that the same quality of delight in a surfer, in a skier, a sexual aficionados, a bulla base cooker, a cabin builder a problem solver...Einstein went into ecstatic places...he transcended...he did not come to understand the fundamental laws of nature through his rational mind. The rational mind is on channel two. He was trying to solve a problem between mass and energy. It's like he goes through a doorway into another way of being in the universe. Everything is here! It's a Gestalt way...a subjective way. It's not objective. It's not subject object. The thinking mind always is thinking about something. So as long as you're in your thinking mind your always one thought away from the action is. You’re always feeling separate from the universe. You can imagine Bach for instance just having the doorway open into another universe where the sounds are, where all the laws are and if you have that doorway open it comes down through you. Then, you can sit around and in a bizarre sense all your doing is copying...you are the instrument...you are the vehicle through which this stuff is coming. Bach's output...it's not like he sits down and thinks, 'what will I do today?'...all he does is open up and the stuff comes through. It's as if you go into this place where all is. It's not conceptual...it's just all is! And as you come back down into form, if you’re doing it sequentially, if your form is music it will come out through music, if it's physics it comes out through E=MC. If it's art it comes through the sculpture of David by Michael Angelo."
"Now", Richard Myers stated with a look in his eye that was so intense Jens could not move, "when you're into these altered states of consciousness or come into the spirit 'if you want to use a religious metaphor,' there are things that you see that are very different from the way you see them in what is called normal waking consciousness or channel 2. Like when you are looking at the universe from channel 5, the way God is seeing it, just outside from time and space, it's just awareness looking at forms; it's all lawfully related...it's all law. The nature of form is that it's connected to everything else in a lawful way. It's all changing and all change is lawful...and you just see it.
You see law in genetics, astronomy, quantum mechanics, music, astrology, archeology, it's in the kabala, the I Ching and the Koran. Everything is related to everything else; lawfully, including your body. And when you see all this law related which includes psychology, sociology, suffering, death and violence...and it's all lawful...and when you look at it from that point of view you say to yourself...it's all perfect! You see the perfection of law made manifest. It's all perfect! Then you come down into your human heart...perfect? Can you look at the world and say...perfect? The suffering the starvation, violence, paranoia...the fear in people. Look in yourself. Look at your own suffering or neurosis. Do you want to call it perfect? It's a paradox...what would be a paradox to the rational mind...perfect, not perfect. If you buy the reality of your human heart while empathizing...it's sure not perfect. So wouldn't you want to stay in a place that's always perfect? If you go up...it's perfect. That's the model of high. Let’s get high where it's all perfect. Spill the drink...perfect. Someone falls down in front of you...karma. It's a very cold place, a very impersonal place but it's a very safe place. Nuclear bomb may fall...well...all lawful! You're seeing form lawfully manifest in front of you. It's all just doing perfect."
But you see, when you come down at the human level the amount of suffering is so painful to see it...to stay open to it...to keep your heart open to all the suffering in the world...it's so painful that you finally have to close your heart down, or either you close your heart down to function down there or you go up. Those are the really only two choices you have. You either burnout by closing down...that's what doctors and nurses do...they have to face suffering and death each day or people who work somewhere where there's so much suffering and you cannot begin to conceive of ending it. No matter how hard you work, you just close yourself down...you close your heart down a little bit or...just go up...just karma...that impersonal place. But that's the way it is, you just can't bear it. How do you begin on the human plain to handle all the suffering?"
"You send them to a shrink," Rick blurted out.
"You go to fix that one or put your finger in the dike and that one’s leaking! Where do you begin? Is it going to be the whales, battered children or the democratic congressman, the children of Biafra or the Cambodian refugee camps, who's suffering more? And they all are saying, 'we are the one'. And you see you can't possibly deal with all the suffering. And for me you see, for many years I thought the game was to get high and get rid of my down. Because when I get high I was one with the universe. Everything was so clear and all the stuff that brought me down I would put over there and I would divide the world into what got me high and what would bring me down. I'd say, 'can't go home and visit the folks...they bring me down' and I started to have little categories in life of 'can't work in the business world...money brings me down' and I suffered from what's called vertical schizophrenia. I mean I use to have two names for it. Richard Myers and then there was Ravi Denpur. Ravi Denpur saw everyone as brothers and sisters and saw all the unfolding of the law...but down here was Richard Myers...he was greedy, lustful, frighten, neurotic...human."
"We're all in that club, Ravi," Dr. Grasson said.
"Yes, I know, but you know, no matter how hard I pushed, Richard Myers would not go away. It was as if I theoretically I knew it was all one but it was all one except for that stuff I was pushing away."
"You seem okay now," Sue said in an encouraging way.
"Somewhere in the last ten years I saw that the game was not to get high the game is to become free!"
"And what did free mean to you at that moment?," Jens asked.
"Free meant you weren't standing anywhere, you had to embrace your lows as well as your highs and free meant as long as you pushed away anything...it had you!"
"What did you do?" asked Sue.
"I am sure he will tell us," whispered Rick.
"I mean, it's like the minute you’re not doing anything, 'I am not being Richard Myers' ...it's got you. And when it says there's no place to stand in the spiritual journey, which is channels one, two, three, four, five and six you stand nowhere. There is no where you’re not there is no where you are."
"I don't understand," Sue said.
"Lets see, it's like the quieter you get and the more you start to hear how it all is, including yourself, the less clearly are you manipulated by it. The more you try to hear your part in the dance and understand the dance has meaning; it isn't an error...it's not like someone screwed up and if someone hadn't screwed up it would all be nice. It's a particular class that we are all going through in a certain curriculum. It's not the be all end all...it's a certain strata of reality in which certain kinds of opportunities for certain experiences are available. It's like if we asked Buddha who we are...Buddha has these wonderful lists...he has five hindrances, 10 fetters, he's got twenty-four no no's and fifty-two this's and that's...the bodi sattva is full of lists. But just taking the five hindrances to play with, he said who we are...we've got lust and greed, that's just one not even two; you can't have one without the other. The second one is hatred and ill will the third one is agitation of mind the fourth one is our old friend’s sloth and toper and the fifth one is doubt. These are the five hindrances. So, if you were going to set up an international community and say who will we have in it...lets have people with lust and greed, hatred and ill will, sloth toper and doubt...what do you think the community would be like?
This!"
The group quickly looked at each other upon hearing that and all nodded their heads up and down which brought much laughter.
"And people who have those kinds of attachment of mind take birth here!
You see Sue, this is the place where the sandpaper is available to work through those things.. which means channel four, from a souls point of view...you now look at your human birth, just the way you've got it right now, just the way it is and realize you created it! What you're doing on earth is you created a curriculum; it's called 'human 305', and until you've finished that curriculum you're going to be sent back again and again and again. Like somebody comes up to me and says, 'I hear you're living in New Mexico now', which isn't true, 'and I want to come and study with you because I've been living in New York and I can't stand it anymore!.' And I say, I don't take on any students but in your case I'll make an exception and my first assignment to give to you is to go live in New York City for a year! Because New York is just New York, it isn't doing anything to you.
You're doing it to yourself through New York. New York is only showing you your own attachments of mind. If there is something that you don't like or you love...that's in you. It means you’re attached to needs, desires, fears, aversions. When do you lose that it's a curriculum and get caught in the curriculum?...the minute your attached to form you begin to suffer. And the minute you deny form...that's an attachment! Do you hear it? You can't grab or push away. You are...as the bible says, 'you're in the world but not of it'".
"So what's the answer?" asked Sue.
"Imagine that you and I have taken birth specifically in order to awaken ...fully...to become free! And that the birth experience, the incarnation is a series of experiences that we that we have designed to help us awaken...to confront us with our attachment. You see, you and I each see a world that is a projection of our own attachments. You've probably heard this from studying psychology. There's a statement, 'the truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing'. When you want something you only see what you want. If you’re hungry, you see only what's eatable. If you're hungry enough, everything becomes eatable. Now, how would it be possible to be in a human birth and still see what is true? You would have to extricate yourself from attachment to your desires. But as a separate entity you have desires...your part of a species that must reproduce, must survive.
You have desires to reproduce, desires to survive, you have desires for security and stability...desires for pleasure. Does this mean you have to give up these desires? No! I didn't say that. The game is to extricate your awareness from attachment or identification to the desires. The desires go on, there. But the only point is you are no longer an identity with those desires."
"I can't imagine how that could be," said Sue.
"But you're doing it all the time. Very often you are performing behavior that is satisfying various needs on your part and yet your awareness is not caught in being the actor or being the getter of gratification yet you're doing it. Like when you find yourself hurdling through space, hopefully in a car, guiding three or four thousand pounds of metal; making incredible complex decisions about physics laws like force and centrifugal force
and at the same time tuning in the radio and looking for police...thinking about where you’re going or where you have been. You’re not thinking about driving anymore. When you’re new at driving you think about driving then later on as you become more experienced, it goes into what we call base brain. It's just sort of happening, it's a very complex behavior."
"Driving is one thing. There are a lot more important things that I need to think about," said Dr. Grasson.
"Is that true?" replied Richard Myers. "The question is, is there anything in life, is there any drama in life that is so seductive that it pulls you in where you lose your space...when you lose that part of you that is not identified with the desire? As long as you see life as a set of choices about what it is you want out of life...it's very confusing. The moment you can identify with the soul and see life as a curriculum for awakening then everything...like, should I buy a new car or not? Well how does that relate to my soul's awakening? And then you see from that point of view, should I buy a new car or not, the answer which most people don't want to hear is that it doesn't matter. Because getting the new car is going to face me with certain learning experiences not getting the new car will face me with certain learning experiences. Often times people come up to me and say, 'should I get divorced?'. They do it very emphatically. They juice it up, 'SHOULD I GET DIVORCED?' Now when I say to them, 'you know it really doesn't matter,' they don't want to hear that at all. Cause they're in a soap opera; as the world turns...I mean they are really in there, they don't want to hear that space at all. But look at it. When you’re at a choice point about any action like should I marry or not...the part of you, if you marry, the part of you that didn't want to marry is going to sit there. And if you don't marry, and the part of you that wanted to marry is still going to be there so you're going to have to work with that stuff either way aren't you? From a point of view of awakening you're going to awaken either way and when you can stand back far enough into this space you can see that all of your life experiences independent of what they are all learning experiences."
"Then does it matter at all?" asked Rick.
"Well from a human point of view it matters...but from a soul's point of view it doesn't matter. You're going to grow through all of it. So from a human point of view you do your best to optimize pleasure, happiness, all the nice things of life. From your soul's point of view, you take what comes down the pike. Because you have that perspective going simultaneously...if you're just in your human situation and you don't get what you want...you're really bummed out! If on the other hand, you have this perspective ...you work to get what you want and if you don't...ah so I'll work with what I got. And at first you awaken out of your attachments and then the attachments pull you back in. Then you’re back wanting, desiring, fearing, hoping, and yearning etc. Then as the process goes on, you start to develop that spaciousness of awareness...that presence, that open heartedness even as you are having these desires. For a long time, Usbenski, who was a student of Breshev, who wrote a book called, 'in search of the miraculous' he advocated a method of self-remembering. He developed a witness, so to speak, which was another part of you that noticed what you were doing. He described how he would experiment with himself and he would say to himself...Usbenski is setting out for a walk...Usbenski is walking down the street...Usbenski is turning left...Usbenski is lifting his left foot, he was just watching, witnessing all of it. All was going well until he saw his tobacconist shop, and he remembered he needed tobacco and he lost it. Two days later he remembered he was doing a experiment. He went under! He let the desire take him over. I think you can all feel that. You can feel that you're going along very spaciously, very free, very loving, very open and then something comes up that pulls you completely into your attachment. Your fear, your yearning...you go to church for instance, and you start to sing...holy, holy, holy, lord God almighty... and you see the angles and the chariots and you look at every one in the congregation and their all your brothers and sisters, 'your fourth channel just opened up'. You say, 'I am never going to change', I am always going to feel this way. It may last until dinner until someone gets the leg of the turkey that you wanted. Some moment like that pulls you back into your separateness. And the process of using your life experiences as a vehicle for awakening is to sit with that process. You baby-sit this process in yourself. You actually see yourself get stuck and then you see yourself come up for air and you begin to notice what it is that sticks you...where you're clinging...which things grasp your awareness. And very often your awareness will be almost totally be grabbed by something but there will be one little thread. It's like, I'll go into a depression...but there's a little part of me that says 'boy am I depressed'. Now the part of me that is noticing it is not depressed. It's just noticing the rest of me is depressed. And I want to make the distinction between what psychologists call disassociation as a mechanism of defense with when something is so unpleasant you push it away and stand back from it and you say, 'look at all that depression, doesn't matter to me,' that's different. That's often spirituality or what you say I am doing for a spiritual reason is really a psycho dynamic reason.
You’re really doing it in order to avoid the pain of living. You go up or you go into that kind of ' doesn't matter to me' mode. I am not talking about that. I am talking about what it is to be in the world but not of the world. Which means to stay open to the human condition, to your fear, longing, hopes, joys, arousal's, depression, loneliness, self-pity, anger, jealously and at the same moment simultaneously develop a spaciousness that surrounds it...just like sky surrounds clouds.
And what you do at first, to develop that appreciation of that part of you that isn't form, that isn't wanting, yearning, and separate, needful you do whatever you do. You do study, you go to retreats. Then as your faith in that part of you gets stronger you don't push away your human experiences as much, you dive into them more deeply until finally when you look at a Buddhist monk that is really free...you see somebody that is richly living life; they’re not sort of dallying on the side sticking a toe in the water...to be in the world but not of the world. If you’re going to get the lessons of life you've got to live life because the experiences of life are the ways you work through the attachments. Life is a series of experiences...you've got to be in them...allow the risk of attachment by constantly connecting to this part that has nothing to do with the attachment. And then you see all of your feelings and all of that is happening...it doesn't mean you're not experiencing them, you are also cultivating a spaciousness. There is some quality of release from suffering the minute you can nurture I yourself that little bit of spaciousness. You can call it the cosmic giggle. You can call it anything you want...it has a certain humor to it, the humor that you've taken it all too seriously. How poignant we are. We get so lost in are melodrama, are you always riding the waves or are you sitting like a big tuna down in the ocean just sort of looking up going...wow, looking from this place sort of undulating."
"What are some ways we can obtain this spaciousness," asked Jens.
"The first step to getting to that spaciousness, one of many methods, is to begin noticing the stuff that catches you. What grabs you in which you are separating part of your consciencesnous as the noticer and part of it as the desirer. Then, as you get further on, even the noticer disappears and it's just space. You're not busy self-consciously noticing, it’s just spaciousness. Like I am talking to you and if you're quiet enough at the same moment I am not talking to you. If your busy just being the listener you're not meeting me in another place where we are just quietly hanging out together...watching the words come and go. And there is a certain kind of listening...like in the Tibetan tradition...Milarapa the great Tibetan yogis...are always pictured with his hand around his ear listening. You listen your way into, it's not listening with your ear, you become an instrument of tuning in which you are tuning into more and more of what is. You are becoming part of the Tao...the way of things."
The group sat quietly while Richard Myers asked to be excused. He said that a book he had upstairs in his room would shed some light on what he meant by tuning into what is. "Will you be here when I get back?" he asked.
"Certainly, we'll be here," answered Rick.
He then quickly left the room.
"Well," said Rick, "we weren't expecting all that now, were we?"
"He does tend to go on a bit" said Dr. Grasson.
"You're just annoyed because you couldn't get a word in edge wise Joel, admit it," Rick said.
"I never thought he'd quit; haven't heard such ramblings since that time I went to hear, what was that guy’s name Sue, swami something,' Rick asked.
"Swami G," replied Rick's wife.
"Yeah, Swami G...whew, now there was a character. Had everybody wanting to walk on hot coals and crushed glass."
"Quiet, he's coming down the stairs," Jens whispered.
"Ah, wonderful...you're all still here!"
"What I want to read you is of an example of this instrument of tuning I was talking about, it's from a book called Mortal Lessons by a Doctor named Seltzer...and these are his words:
On the bulletin board in the front hall of the hospital where I work there appeared an announcement , Yeshi Dondan, it read, will make rounds at six-o'clock on the morning of June the 12th, the particulars where given followed by a notation; Yeshi Dondan is the personal physician to the Dalai Lama. I am not so leathery a skeptic that I would knowingly ignore an emissary from the Gods; not only such sangfaux be inimical to one's earthly wellbeing it could take care of eternity as well! Thus on the morning of June the 12th, I joined the clutch of white coats waiting in the small conference room adjacent to the ward selected for the rounds the air in the room is heavy with ill-concealed dubiety and suspicion of bamboozlement. At precisely six-o'clock he appeared as a short golden barrel man dressed in a sleeveless robe of saffron and maroon his scalp is shaven and the only visible hair is a scantily black line above each hooded eye. He bows in greeting while his young interpreter makes the introduction. Yeshi Dondan we are told will examine a patient selected by a member of the staff. The diagnosis is as unknown to Yeshi Dondan as it is to us. The examination of the patient will take place in our presence after which we will reconvene in the conference room while Yeshi Dondan will discuss the case. We are further informed that for the past two hours Yeshi Dondan has purified himself by bathing, fasting and prayer. I, having breakfasted well, performed only the most basic of ablutions and given no thought at all to my soul...glanced fervently at my fellow medical colleagues and suddenly we seem a soiled uncoothed lot. The patient had been awakened early and was told that she would be examined by a foreign doctor and been asked to provide a fresh specimen of urine. So when we enter the room the women shows no surprise, she has long ago taken on that mixture of compliance and resignation that is the face of chronic illness. This was yet another series of endless tests and examinations. Yeshi Dondan steps to the bedside while the rest stand apart watching for a long time as he gazes at the women favoring no part of her body with his eyes best seeming to fix his glance at a place someplace above her supine form. I to study her. There is no physical sign nor obvious symptom that gives a clue to the nature of her disease. At last he takes her hand raising it in both of his own. Now he bends over the bed in a kind of crouching stance, his head drawn down in the collar of his robe, his eyes are closed as he feels for her pulse. In a moment he finds the spot and for the next half hour he remains thus...suspended half above the patient like some exotic golden bird with folded wings holding the pulse of the women beneath her fingers cradling her hand in his. All the power of the man has seemed to have been drawn down into this one purpose. It is palpitation of the pulse raised to the state of ritual. From off the foot of the bed where I stand it is as though he and the patient have entered a special place of isolation of a separateness about which a vacancy hovers and a cross which no violation is possible. After a moment, the women rests back upon her pillow from time to time she raises her head to look at the stranger figure above her then sinks back once more. I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate...his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers through her wrist. All at once, I am envious...not of him, not of Yeshi Dondan for his gift of beauty and holiness but of her. I want to be held like that...touched so, received and I know that I who have palpitated a hundred thousand pulses have not felt a single one!
At last Yeshi Dondan straightens and gently places the women's hand upon the bed and steps back. The interpreter produces a small wooden bowel and two sticks. Yeshi Dondan pours a portion of the urine specimen into the bowel and proceeds to whip the liquid with the two sticks; this he does for several minutes until a foam is raised. Then bowing above the bowel he inhales the odor three times. He sets down the bowel and turns to leave all this while he has not uttered a single word. As he nears the door the women raises her head and calls out to him in a voice once urgent and serene. 'Thank you doctor,' she says as she touches with her other hand the place he had held on her wrist. As though to recapture something that had visited there. Yeshi Dondan turns back for a moment to gaze at her and steps into the corridor...rounds are at an end.
We are seated once more in the conference room, Yeshi Dondan speaks now or the first time in soft Tibetan sounds that I've never heard before. He has barely begun when the young interpreter begins to translate the two voices continuing in a tandem bilingual fugue the one chasing the other. It is like the chanting of monks he speaks of winds coursing through the body of the women. Currents that break against barriers eddying...these vortices are in her blood, the last spending of an imperfect heart. Between the chambers of her heart long before she was born a wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must not be opened through it changed the full waters of her river as the mountain stream cascades through the mountain at springtime, battering knocking loose the land and flooding her breath. Thus he speaks and is silent. May we now have the diagnosis please the professor asks. The host of these rounds...the man who knows answers...congenital heart disease, inter ventricular septal defect with resultant heart failure.
"A gateway in the heart I think...that must not be opened...through it charged the waters that flood her breath. So here then is the doctor listening to sounds of the body to which the rest of us are deaf. He is more than doctor, he is priest," Richard Myers said softly.
"Once you can appreciate that there are other parts of your being from which the universe is heard differently and that when you rest in these other parts of your being you hear clearly then you can understand the meaning of your manifestation and how to function within it. Then the stance you adopt is that of someone who is listening...tuning...it's like tuning an instrument. You’re tuning and listening to what is...to what is."
Everyone, but Rick, got up from their seats and rushed to praise and thank the man for his illuminating talk. Jens, just sat there, and seemed unable to move; Marguerite walked over to him.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
He answered in the affirmative and suddenly, got up and walked quickly past her and, not wanting to participate in the collective adulation's that were being thrust upon the sage, walked through the hall, into the music room and sat down at his piano. He began playing the Moon Light Sonata very quietly and slowly. Marguerite followed him into the room.
"I only came in at the end, but, where did you find this man?" she asked.
"A walk-in, can you believe it! It's so strange, lately I've been reading so much about things like philosophy and metaphysics and this stranger walks and begins to discuss a "way" that makes so much sense; he really knew how to tie it all together. I am on such a high, I don't want to go back in just yet, I want to absorb what I've just heard in there" Jens said as his fingers softly but over the keyboard. Marguerite stood next to him closely and noticing a match box on the bookshelf behind the piano, picked it up, opened it, removed a match and lit the two candles that were on each side of the music stand.
"There, if we can't have actual moonlight then candle light will have to do!" she said. She stood there, watching his hands and fingers ever so carefully while letting the seductive sounds enter her. Jens was conscious of her presence and although enjoying the attention, all he really wanted was to be left alone to reflect on what he had just experienced in the next room. But it was impossible, impossible to ignore her beauty and soft manner in which she spoke so he listened and accommodated her questions as best he could while continuing to play. Across the hall, Richard Myers was being asked all sorts of questions.