Also sprach das Selbst

Like all children, I was born as a being of curiosity and joy.

Though perhaps I had too much kindness and silence in me. Nature called to me. And like all children I had what some thing of as a secret need for love. Perhaps mine was greater than others, as I was never fed quite enough. Thus solitude and sadness lurked at the edges from a young age.

As much as I loved exploring the world, experiencing the completely new, shadow already had me. I could see the immense expanse of the world, but was acutely aware, and often damnably reminded of my smallness.

See if you will: The Doom of Kickball

Certainly, in the age of space exploration, when all I wanted to be was an astronaut, the following conversation did not help.

Self: Mom, I'm going to be an astronaut!

Mother: No. You can't. It will never work: your eyes are too bad.

Grade school was not an improvement.

Having a father who's cultural interests are... different, tends to allow one a different sort of development. Who can say their first theater movie was Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads? (I fell asleep about twenty minutes in.) Or that 2001: A Space Odyssey has been their favorite movie since the age of seven? Or that it was suggested that one should read The Crying of Lot 49 at twelve?

Speaking of twelve and the surrounding years...

Puberty and junior high were revolting. So much about my own self disgusted me. Hair that wasn't on my head. Learning about desire and its sticky residue in the contaminated petri dish called school. The ostracism that came from without and within. Existence was being stuck in a sealed, filth filled garbage bag, where struggling to escape only made things so much worse. I disgusted myself and no one disagreed.

It is no surprise to me that by high-school, and well into college, I perched on the edge of the void.

Very very honestly, I do not know how I survived. In some senses I didn't. While I was too square (thanks Nancy?) to do all the drugs, and too cowardly to dip my toes in potential oblivion, I did inundate myself in games. Depression owned me, and escaping became my primary activity in life. School, learning, people, could not hold my attention. My sister tried to remind me that I was meant to be doing something to benefit my future. She didn't know that I didn't believe in my future. I failed out of college and entered the workforce.

After various tribulations I found myself heading towards the bottom in Los Angeles. The first tech boom had hooked me into its fatal, maddened cloud of tech bros and money tornados. When the money ran out, and it ran out pretty fast, out I was dumped: I knew not a whit about coding and was a terrible employee. Gaining weight and losing hope, I coasted through a never ending series of temp jobs. Towards what end? None of course.

Fortunately an old friend, a timeless friend, appeared. I saved him from what he called a sepulcher, and he saved me from myself. At least a little.

While all was not wine and roses, something shifted. Something about my friend's presence stabilized me. Gave me some kind of purchase in the world. I started a career that had meaning. And because he functioned as a nexus of the extraordinary, the divine, and the human, the impossible happened.

Through unbelievable, and, in retrospect, hilarious circumstances, I came into the presence of the Dharma. Everything began to change very quickly. While the cultural and ritual trappings of that tradition took some time to settle, I was almost instantly hooked on the philosophy. My own father’s work in continental philosophy sought to combat nihilism, something that had nearly destroyed me, but in Buddhism I found a much more meaningful solution than just hoping to be someone born with a positive outlook.

Emptiness, a terrible English word, is all we get when trying to translate the unbelievably nuanced term śūnyatā from Sanskrit. But this concept was gasoline and matches to my pile of desiccated wood. Through intense dedication and practice, thanks to a passion of bonfire proportions, something I hadn’t experienced in my life up until then, I was able to throw myself headlong into the challenging ideas of Buddhist philosophy. Finally, the bliss of hard work and tackling challenges was available to me.

My transformation was startling. I lost weight. I came off of antidepressants. I started to behave with responsibility towards my work and social calendar. I was driven. I was a zealot and I loved it. Driving on the 405 from the Valley to Venice at crazy hours, drinking red bull, and blazing with a lust for wisdom, I was transformed.

The heady rush of positive change gave way to the contemplative nature of the practice. I found myself drawn to retreats and asked my teacher for guidance. I told him I wanted to do a silent, solitary retreat of ten days. With great wisdom he told me, “How about you promise to do five days, and, if it’s going well, stay in retreat.

The retreat was a fascinating experience. At 12:01 am on the morning of the sixth day I came out of retreat, somehow full of both fear and elation. My teacher, as would happen over and over again, had properly predicted my experience: for this first retreat there was no way I could have stayed more than five days. The calm of meditation was interspersed with what I will term "world withdrawal." A strange terror that comes when you have no access to everything else everyone else is doing. As a result I ended up calling him at 1:00am to thank him. Being a patient, loving person, he very kindly listened to me rave for a few minutes and then asked me nicely to check in with him later in the day.

I studied with intensity for several years. I seemed to be hurtling towards monasticism, a fact that deeply distressed my parents. I asked my teacher three times for ordination. The first two times he merely scoffed. The third time I asked he took me seriously, and we set about discussing the logistics not only of how I would be ordained, but where I would live, and what I would be doing. But then...

A love founded on the rock of teaching. I met her because I had hired her to teach yoga at a retreat I was about to lead. At that time I could follow instructions to do yoga, but I could not teach it. My teachers had asked me to lead a retreat on death awareness and, knowing there would be a great deal of meditation, I wanted someone to come and teach asana every morning. Fate put us in each other’s paths, and it so happened that the paths were almost identical. Things moved very quickly.

I have always hated school dances. All of them. From their inception late in junior high, all the way to the end of college. Like a pyramid in a world of flat cogs, I did not mesh. Then one day, in high-school, for just one song, a good friend of mine just grabbed me and we ran, heedless, fearless, through the throng of sweaty, overwhelmed sacks of hormones. Free of expectation. Free of need or loss. We ran to the music and it was bliss. Meeting the woman who would become my wife felt the same. It was free of the usual fears of meeting women. Free of the mundane encumbrance of trying to find someone who just might someday be a life partner with whom you will do taxes and raise children. Free of the shy, tentative, embarrassed stages of high energy sex peppered with the fear that person may disappear at any moment. Free of any of those trappings, it felt like I had met someone with whom I could, almost literally, take flight.

And fly we did. If my lone zeal was enough to propel me at incredible speeds through a dense curriculum of complex philosophies and foreign traditions, then our combined desire to practice was akin to solar fusion. We forged ahead in our studies as a dedicated pair.

We spent a great deal of time in the air. We traveled to the haunts of our parents. We traveled to the parched, secret academies of our teachers. We traveled the world; to the East and the Continent. We studied. We taught. We lived extraordinary lives of devoted joy.

Things only got crazier as we lived in no particular place, hauling our live’s belongings from place to place. Sometimes we agonized in the heat of Tucson. Sometimes we ran from yoga class to yoga class, laughing as we failed, as all do, to outpace the juggernaut of New York City. But we had a goal and a time limit. A retreat. To disappear into the desert to do our practice with the unbridled focus we thought it deserved. But up until then it would be chaos.

Building a cabin in the desert takes money, unless you know a lot about building and can get materials for cheap. While we had colleagues that fit into that category, we lacked that builder’s sensibility. So we launched ourselves and our grossly overweight suitcases back and forth across the Pacific. We taught. We raised money. We very nearly begged. As much as we were working towards a practice that would finally pierce the superficiality of the mundane, we were wearing down that very thin practice that had sustained us through the madness of daily life. It was challenging and I’m fairly certain that, amongst other things, traveling to and fro with such frequency set me up for years of regularly occurring headaches. Still there was a goal, and one that struck me as worth almost any price.

Perhaps in some other venue I will fail to properly describe, in all of its depth and internecine contradictions, the horrific majesty of solitary retreat far out in the Arizona desert. We were supposed to be there, in dedicated practice, for three years, three months, and three days. We did it because we wanted to. Because of the exhortations of our teachers. Because I had meditated on what I wanted from the world, and serving it through self improvement seemed noble. For a multitude of mad reasons, we had to depart after approximately four hundred and fifty days. What was supposed to be a transformation, a metamorphosis from damaged, selfish being, into a realized being built on a framework of kindness, became a chipper shredder for the self. Everything I had given away to get into retreat, all the relationships I had sacrificed, were set ablaze, and on top of them were added the bloody, finely chopped remains of anything I had left.

(If you have the time now, or perhaps later, I recommend listening to all five.)

I had to put so many things back together. My wife. My relationship to my parents. My understanding of the world. From scratch I had to erect a levee against the dark waters of knowing I had failed, and that the one thing I wanted, to meditate, had been fundamentally torn from me. It was all shaky, and had the shoddiest construction. For the beings that had been my foundation, my teachers, were the ones who had turned on each other, on the teachings, and on me, in the great collapse of the retreat. Perhaps it was a success: I had no ground. Or, should I want to tow the line, I must say I finally was experiencing the groundlessness that had always been there.

Add to all of this the renewed universal enforcement of my impotence as a human agent. The people that had dared to suggest that I was a person of worth had betrayed me. And it was a sin to blame them. All my sadness and rage could only flow back along the ancient channels: towards the self.

I move through life a shadow. Hiding in the video games that had ruined my earlier life. Choosing to let them ruin me again. People ask me over and over, “What job are you going to do?” I have no answer. There are no jobs for dust filled husks made of dead ends.

Secretly, even in the days that I considered monasticism, I wished for a son. It was a soft wish. More of an occasional day dream. I told no one. Even when my wife decided we could have a child, I never expressed any hope that it would be a boy. I held that thought to myself. A final firefly slowly starving in my desiccated soul. Indeed, my wife was certain that we were going to have a daughter, and I rejoiced earnestly, all while fantasizing about what my life might have been like should I have had a son. But while assisting the birth, I, along with a nurse and a midwife, saw at the very first moment that it would be possible to know (since my wife had refused all testing to know the gender), that I had a son.

Still I struggle. Blessings and curses are strewn about the place. Time passes, some things improve. Some things are full of youth and beautiful to observe. Some things are the increasingly frequent reminder that our universe has a tendency towards entropy.

Time takes its toll. Joy seeps in. Things change and somehow stay the same. I may be learning. Tentatively, I hope. Somehow I am starting to believe I will make it far into the future, despite everything that has happened so far.

I cannot lay claim to any feats of prognostication. The future is a mystery to me. The highs and lows of living assail me as they do most. Still, I wish to end on a positive note. I head into the unknown, healing. It may be slow, but it is better than what came before. Let us proceed then, accompanied by the music that made a commute from the valley to the city manageable. I don’t think that’s a metaphor for anything.