فصل 11

11

Get Thee to a Monastery

I moved into my new house in November 1971. I remember it was November because just before I moved in, my sister, Kerry, and her husband came up from Miami to visit me for Thanksgiving. This was very brave of them, considering they were regular folk. Harvey was a successful accountant, and he and Kerry were used to a nice house and comfortable living conditions. When they showed up, I was busy finishing the final checklist before moving out of my van and into the house. Harvey helped me install the last two windows and then insisted on having Thanksgiving dinner with me. That meant they joined me sitting outside on rocks and cooking what we could on an open fire. Personally, I think they had come up to check on me to see if I was still halfway sane. I had been without a phone number for a long time, and I’m sure my family must have been concerned about me.

Once Kerry and Harvey left, I was glad to be alone again with my beautiful new house. All I had wanted was a simple place to fully focus on my meditations. What I got was a gift from the invisible hand that had taken over my life. That’s what I called it back then—the invisible hand. From the beginning of my awakening, I had inwardly begged for help in knowing who I was, the one who was watching the voice of the mind. From that point forward, it was as though something had reached down and grabbed me by the ponytail and begun to pull me up. My whole outer life had been ripped away from me in the blink of an eye. In its place I had been shown the beauty and peace of an inner state that was beyond anything I had ever imagined. That touch of the beyond had lit my heart aflame. I had a fire burning in the pit of my being that never left me alone—even for a moment. It was like a beckoning, a calling to come home. At that stage of my awakening, the only way I knew how to get back was to willfully push my way through myself with the intense discipline of Zen meditation. As I sat at the threshold of the door that opened into the beautiful place that life had given me to do this work, I reverently bowed my head. This was my temple, my monastery, and I vowed to use it well.

I was very surprised to find that the monastic lifestyle came quite naturally to me. I awoke every morning at 3:00 a.m. and sat for a few hours of meditation. I would then do contemplative walking out on the fields. In those early days, I was still holding on to the concept that it was all about concentration and focus. When I walked, I would become acutely aware of every step I took and every movement of my body. This helped to prolong the peace I felt from my morning meditations. I would then do yoga postures outside until it was time for my noon meditation. I held the rope of self-discipline very tightly, every day. It was an extremely strict lifestyle, very different from anything I had ever experienced. But just as an athlete is willing to give everything, every day and night, to train for the Olympics, so I was willing to give everything, every moment, to drop the part of me that was holding me back from where I so desperately wanted to go.

It didn’t take long before I noticed that food had a major effect on my practices. The less I ate, the easier it was to fall into a meditative state. So I tested the limits of how far I could go without eating. The balance I reached was to eat a small dinner salad every other day and fast in between. My intention was to give up everything possible that pulled my attention outward. This would allow me to more fully focus on the deeper inner states.

My nighttime routine began at sunset. Somehow the setting sun strongly affected the force that pulled me into meditation. I was always on my meditation pillow before the sun started setting. After a few hours of meditation, I would make my way upstairs to go to sleep. I had no alarm clock; I awoke naturally at 3:00 a.m. every morning to start the regimen again.

I don’t know where I got the idea that if I held the rope tight enough, my lower self would go away and leave me alone. But that is how I lived for about a year and a half. The part of me that had dominated my entire previous way of life had no place in my new life. There were no perks for him, and every day he fought back less and less. The noisy, demanding personal part of me didn’t go away—he just began to resign himself to the intense discipline. I thought it was working, but I would soon come to see that I was very wrong.