فصل 19

19

Acceptance, Acceptance, and More Acceptance

My mind remained very peaceful during my drive across the country. But I faced a serious challenge to my vow of acceptance the moment I arrived home. As I drove through the woods onto the interior field, instead of the characteristic silence, I heard the buzz of a circular saw. I then saw Sandy and my friend Bob Gould donned in carpentry aprons and climbing on a structure they were building on my land. It was one of those rub-your-eyes-in-disbelief moments.

I asked what was going on. Sandy cheerfully informed me that she was building a house, and Bob Gould had agreed to help her. I don’t recall the demeanor of my voice, but I reminded her that this was my land on which she was building her house. Again, very cheerfully, Sandy replied that she was laying no claims to the house, and it would be mine when she decided to leave. She obviously had worked it all out in her head and had no problem with it. I decided I’d better go home and meditate a bit before responding.

Imagine what that voice in my head was saying: Oh my God! How dare she make a decision like that without even asking me? I don’t want another house on my land. I don’t want anyone else staying out here, so why would I want another house? How in the world does someone make a decision to build a house on someone else’s property without ever asking them? On and on it went, but by then I was well trained to just calmly observe all these thoughts being created by the preference-driven mind. After all, if I had wanted another house on the property that voice would be saying, What a miracle! God stepped in and started building me a second house without my having to do a single thing. To me, it didn’t matter what that voice was saying. I knew to the core of my being that I was not going to give him the time of day, not to mention the run of my life. If I had a choice between using this real-life situation to get my way or to free myself from being bound to my way, I would choose freedom every time. That was the essence of my experiment with life: if it’s down to a matter of preference—life wins. So I went back up the hill, strapped on an apron, and helped them build Sandy’s house.

It felt good to be building again. This time around I was not a greenhorn—I was a carpenter. The difference is amazing between the first time you do something and the next. I felt like I knew what I was doing, and that gave me a sense of confidence and inner strength. I wasn’t working on the house for Sandy, or for myself; the flow of life had placed me in this situation. It was during the building of Sandy’s cabin that I first started the ritual of offering my work up to the invisible force that was guiding me. I was not in charge, yet life continued to unfold as if it knew just what it was doing. I would serve that force. Call it what you want—God, Christ, Spirit. These were no longer just names of something to believe in. The events that were pulling me through life were tangible and real to me. Inwardly, I began to offer everything I did up to the Universal Force. All I wanted was to return home to that beautiful place deep inside of me. If following the invisible hand of life would take me there, so be it.

Sandy’s house was very simple. It was similar to what I had thought we were going to build for my place. Her twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin had no electricity, no plumbing, no inside siding, and the window openings were covered with only screens and some plastic. It only took about six weeks to build and cost almost nothing, but she loved it. I smile now when I look back at my initial resistance. I could never have imagined how many important life experiences of mine would end up being tied to that cabin.

Meanwhile, summer was over and the time to start my classes at Santa Fe was rapidly approaching. I had been true to my commitment of not allowing a single thought to enter my mind about what I was going to teach. How would I ever know what life was capable of doing if I was always in control? I walked into my first class at Santa Fe completely open to whatever would unfold. As the students filed in, I simply quieted my mind and asked myself, Do you have something worthwhile to teach these students? In my heart I knew that I had a wealth of knowledge that would be both interesting and beneficial to their lives. So I took a breath, stood up, and just started speaking. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that exact moment was laying the groundwork for the next phase of my spiritual journey: becoming a teacher.

The words just flowed out. There was no prior thinking involved. The first session laid out the road map of what we were going to do in the class, just as though a curriculum had been decided beforehand. It was similar to when I was writing that economics paper in my van in the woods. Except this time, I was watching a continuous stream of inspiration turning into a powerful lecture. I was not doing any of this—I was just aware of it.

As the semester progressed, this kept happening class after class. I was amazed by what was being taught in these classes. It was as though all the knowledge from my schooling, plus all that I had learned through introspective meditation and the relentless watching of the voice, was being woven together into a cohesive whole. The premise of the course was centered on the possibility that one underlying truth exists in the universe, and all of man’s knowledge was just looking at this truth from different perspectives. The exploration of that premise would involve physics, biology, psychology, and religion. What was the possibility that they were all saying the same thing? I had never thought about things in this way before. In fact, I had spent my time learning to not make thoughts a pastime. How could each class come out so perfectly without my doing it? Nonetheless, the presentation was unfolding on a class-by-class basis before my eyes.

The success of the classes was overwhelming. I would start the semester with twenty students in the room, and by the end the count had doubled. I remember one class where I literally had trouble entering the classroom. Twenty students were registered and another forty or so were either sitting in class or listening from the hallway. People would just keep bringing their friends. I was still into being quiet and didn’t want all this to become a distraction to my practices. So I tried to isolate myself by coming to school just before class, leaving right afterward, and not attending any faculty meetings or school functions. It didn’t matter. This was the ’70s, and I was teaching Universal Thought in the midst of the consciousness revolution. Over time, students and their friends began to show up for the Sunday meditations at my place.

As if that were not enough, those classes at Santa Fe laid the groundwork for another very spiritual flow of events. This time it was regarding, of all things, my doctoral dissertation. I had been telling Dr. Goffman that my life had taken me far from the field of economics, and I had no intention of writing a dissertation. Nonetheless, one day he made me promise, as a personal favor to him, that I would turn in something, anything, for him to read. I had great love and respect for Dr. Goffman, and I saw it as an act of surrender to acquiesce to his wishes. That very night, I sat down on the floor of my house, lit my kerosene lamp, and asked myself if I had something to write that was worth such an enormous undertaking. It only took a moment to realize that I did have something very important to write, and I would love for Dr. Goffman to read it. It seems that life had just given me the perfect opportunity to write about that voice in your head and the oneness behind all of science and religion—just as I had been teaching in my classes at Santa Fe.

With that as the topic, I was filled with inspiration. Though I knew it wouldn’t be accepted as an economics dissertation, I put my heart and soul into my writing. As it turned out, the finished document had an unexpected destiny of its own. A professor on my doctoral committee had a publisher contact me, and within a year, my dissertation was published under the title The Search for Truth. Thirty-five years later, that book still sells copies every month on Amazon—a fitting tribute to the acts of surrender that brought it into this world.

What is important from all this is that if I had listened to my own mind, none of this would have happened. By following the flow of life, instead of my own preferences, I was now a carpenter, a teacher, and a published author. Inwardly, I had grown as well. The sharp line I had drawn between spiritual and nonspiritual had begun to fade. The energy I experienced while teaching my classes at Santa Fe was the same energy I was dealing with in my yoga and meditations. In meditation, that energy would flow upward and lift me away from my everyday self. When I stood in front of a class, the very same energy would explode into a passionate, heartfelt lecture. Not only did I begin to see all this as the flow of spiritual energy, but I also began to see that there was no difference between coming to class to teach and driving home to do my meditative practices. I was teaching those classes because an amazing flow of events had put me there. I was driving home because an amazing flow of events had put me there. Neither of these destinations was decided by me. They were the result of my letting go of myself. Little by little, the fabric of my life was composed of the results of my surrender. I was becoming surrounded by a life that had been built for me, not by me. In my wildest dreams, however, I could never have imagined where this was going to lead me.