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Chapter 3: Hearing

There is no such thing as one's autobiography. The events of our past do not amount to a history, a synthesis or even a person. It is only a continuous cycle of concerns for life and death. If I were to write about a few of those moments, I could create an image. This in fact is what we do with memory. We retain a few events, a complex emotion, a kind of narrative with a peculiar emphasis. Thus, we conceive of ourselves by partial contemplation. But if we could include it all, and knowingly conceive the nature of experience at any moment, there is no separate person in the mind. There is no emphasis in the whole. Nothing stands out. The more deeply and completely I experience the recollection of my life, the more arbitrary every mark becomes.

There are a few events in my own life that stand whole by themselves. They do not signify a peculiar life, and artificial, emphatic person. They are moments that communicate and cease to hide reality. These are the genuine subject of my autobiography, the only truly expressive moments in my life. And they do not speak of me alone, but they are moments in the visible, knowable, communicated life of reality.

When I was a boy the "bright" was my constant knowledge of reality. But the more a listener I became, the more the knowledge of reality became an occasion, an overwhelming event, an enlightenment." The subject of this chapter is the first and primary event of conscious reality in my life after

the "bright" had disappeared into my childhood and I' had become a listener, a seeker for my own truth.

When I entered Columbia College in September 1957 I was possessed with a single, motivating interest. I wanted to understand what we are. Whatever particular studies were required of me, I was always at work on this one thing, and I was forever researching some kind of primary thesis out of great need.

The experience of study at Columbia was completely devastating. I had never in my life encountered any kind of sophisticated thought. But now I suddenly became aware of the literature of the world. The mood at Columbia in those years was profoundly solemn and critical. The attitude and the dilemma that I encountered when I gave my little speech on prejudice was here extended as the consciousness of the race.

Grayson Kirk, who was then President of the University, introduced us to college life with a serious speech about the rising problems of humanity. He promised that Columbia would not teach us the answers, but we would perhaps learn the questions. He promised only that we would learn how to think.

I was deeply impressed by his attitude and that whole formidable crowd of lecturing thinkers. It seemed like an appropriate place to expand in my doubts, but I was puzzled how one of the highest institutions of our learning could represent itself as anything but the bearer of truth. I soon learned that the truth was always in research in such places. They are not institutions of truth but of doubt.

I began to read the deposits of our culture. And all my idols lost their power. To begin with, I learned that the holy Christian truth was anything but the guiding form of our civilization. There is a thesis emphasized in all the little bits of thought generated in a university education. In that thesis man is described as necessarily mortal, functionally conditioned and, at best, creative as a social animal. His universe is described as materially prior to conscious life, and it is chronically understood without recourse to spiritual or religious propositions.

Every book I read and every course I took emphasized this thesis in some unique way. This experience very quickly destroyed even the latent image of Christ that I had stored up in childhood. A book that deeply affected me early in my freshman year was The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed, by Charles Francis Potter. Even the church seemed to proclaim the absence of its own truth. In a chapter entitled "The New Jesus," Dr. Potter wrote:

The new "demythologized" Jesus, seen from afar, is already stampeding the more canny modern theologians to the new ark of safety, the Barth-Bultmann Bandwagon, where they chant the new Christian (?) mantra, 'The Resurrection was not something that happened to Jesus, but something that happened to the faith of his disciples.' In other words, the myth of the Resurrection still saves, if you have faith enough to believe that myth is sometimes closer to truth than is history.

Rev. Dr. Charles Francis Potter, The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1962), p.9

After about six months of "education" I went to my old pastor with my doubts. I wanted to know if the resurrection and ascension of Christ, his miracles and power, and all of the doctrine of God had any support in evidence He was unable to offer me a single means of faith. Instead, he tried to make a mockery of educators and psychologists. He railed about John Dewey and progressive education. And he let me go home with a prayer to God for our salvation.

From that time I was passed into the terror of my doubts. I could not possibly overemphasize the effect of those doubts. I was completely lifted out of the ease of my childhood. My mind sank into despair and actual terror. I had fixed my freedom and joy into the image of Christ, and I had long ago given over the support of my happiness to the Church. Now that symbol was wrecked by the same ones who had carried it through time.

My doubt grew overnight into awesome fear. I felt as if I were living under the threat of death. Life, it seemed to me, was only dying and afraid. I had not a single reason for joy. I saw no faith in anyone, no inexplicable grace. I saw only the constant drove of civilized men, a long history of illusions sewn up in the single foundation of a muscular mortality. There was only death, a constant ending, a rising fear, a motivated forgetfulness and escape.

I became profoundly aware of conflict and suffering everywhere. There was only struggle and disease, fear and longing, self-exploitation and emptiness, questions without answers. In every man I recognized the complex of doubt. Then I understood the root of conflict in my parents and the necessity for illusions, for exotic pleasures, for relief and distraction. I knew t _re was not a single man who had overcome the mystery of this death I knew this education would only be a long description of fundamental suffering, since all were convinced of the truth of mortality.

From then my schooling ceased to be a serious study. I knew that from beginning to end it had only one object to proclaim, and I had learned it already. From its effects in me and in all mankind, I knew this model of learning was not sufficient. I hadn't a single objective reason for joy, except that I remembered the "bright."

As a boy I had never been a conscious Christian until I was perhaps five or six years old. But, previous to that age, I had already been a conscious form of light that knew no dilemma and no death. Now in my later life the "bright" had seemed to disappear in the human truth, and I had no means to enjoy it. But I could not assert our mortal philosophy, even if I could not counter it.

Thus, I dedicated myself to another awesome experiment. I decided that I would begin an experimental life along the same lines as that which controlled the mood of our civilization. I decided that I would unreservedly exploit every possibility for experience. I would avail myself of every possible human experience, so that nothing possible to mankind, high or low, would be unknown to me.

This decision became very clear to me one night at a party. I knew that no other possibility was ones to me but that of exhaustive experience. And I thought "If God exists, He will not cease to exist by any action of my own, but, if I devote myself to all possible experience, lie will indeed find some way, in some one or a complex of my experiences or my openness itself, to reveal Himself to me." Thereafter, I devoted myself utterly and solely to every possible kind of exploit.

No experience posed a barrier to me. There were no taboos, no extremes to be prevented. There was no depth of madness and no limit of suffering that my philosophy could prevent, for, if it did, I would be liable to miss the lesson of reality. Thus, I extended myself even beyond my own fear. And my pleasures also became extreme, so there was a constant machine of ecstasy. I could tolerate no mediocrity, no medium experience. I was satisfied with neither atheism nor belief. Both seemed to me only ideas, possible reactions to a more fundamental if unconscious fact. I sought reality, began to to be reality, what is, not what is asserted in the face of what is.

I read and studied every kind of literature. It would be impossible for me to count the thousands of books and influences I embraced in my years of experimenting. I began to write my reflections. My lecture notes in college were filled with long passages of my own, where I would write whatever conclusions or impulses rose in me at the time. A continuous argument of internal contemplation began to move in me, so that I was always intensely pursuing an internal logic, distracted or enlarged at times by some idea or experience in my education.

My lecture notebooks and my separate journals become long volumes of my own thinking. They were at first mainly philosophical notes that developed from a kind of desperate and childish complaint into a more and more precise instrument of thought and feeling. Then I began to write poetry also, and to conceive of works of fiction that would express this dilemma and lead to some kind of solution, some opening, some kind of primary joy.

I became a kind of mad and exaggerated young man, whose impulses were not allowable in this medium culture. My impulses were exploitable only in secret extensions of my own consciousness, or in the company of whores, libertines and misfits.

My father's younger brother, Richard, asked me what I wanted to do with my life. He could see that I lived only abandoned to adventure, and there was no apparent purpose in me. I told him that I wanted to save the world. And I was absolutely serious. That remark totally expressed all of my reasons. Some incredible knowledge was the goal of my seeking and not any experience I could ever possess.

I went on in this fashion for more than two years, until the whole violence of my seeking precipitated an experience late one night in the middle of my junior year. I had rented a small room from an old woman named Mrs. Renard. It was several blocks away from the college campus. When I was not in class, I spent most of my time in, that room reading, thinking and writing.

On this very special evening I sat at my desk late into the night. I had exhausted my seeking, so that it seemed there were no more books to read, no possible kind of experience that could radically exceed what I had already embraced. There seemed no outstanding sources for any new excursion, no remaining and conclusive possibilities. I was drawn into that interior tension of my mind that held all of that seeking, every impulse and alternative, every motive in the form of my desiring. I contemplated it as a whole dramatic force, and it seemed to move me into a profound shape of energy, so that every vital center in my body and mind appeared like a long funnel of contracted planes that led on to an infinitely regressed and invisible image. I observed this deep sensation of conflict and endlessly multiplied contradictions, so that I seemed to surrender to its very shape, as if to experience it perfectly and to be it.

Then, quite suddenly, in a moment, I experienced a total revolution of energy and awareness in myself. There was an absolute sense of understanding that opened and arose at the extreme end of all this consciousness. And all of the energy of thought that moved down into that depth appeared to reverse its direction at some unfathomable point The rising impulse caused me to stand, and I felt a surge of force draw up out of my depths and expand, filling my whole body and every level of my consciousness with wave on wave of the most beautiful and joyous energy.

I felt absolutely mad, but the madness was not of a desperate kind. There was no seeking and no dilemma within it, no question, no unfulfilled motive, not a single object or presence outside of myself.

I couldn't contain the energy in my small room. I ran out of the building and through the streets. I thought, if I could only find someone to talk to, to communicate this thing. The energy in my body was overwhelming, and there was an ecstasy in every cell that was almost intolerable in its pressure, light and force. But it was the middle of the night. There were no lights coming from the rooms. I could think of no one to awaken who would understand my experience. I felt that, even if I were to meet a friend, I would be unable to express myself, but my words would only be a kind of uncontrolled poetry of babbling.

My head began to ache with the intense energy that saturated my brain. I thought, if I could only find someone with some aspirin or something to tranquilize me. But there was no one. And at last I wore myself out wandering in the streets, so that I returned to my room.

I sat down at my desk and wrote my mind in a long, ecstatic essay. I tried to contain all the significance of my perception. until finally I became exhausted in all the violence of my joy, and I passed to sleep.

In the days that followed I tried to communicate these events to a few friends. But no one seemed to grasp its importance or consider it more than some kind of crazy excitement. I even read aloud to one friend the things I had written, but it became clear as I went on that it was only a collection of images. He only laughed at my excitement, and I thought it would be impossible to communicate that experience itself.

As it happened, it took me many years to understand that revolution in my being. As you will see, it marked the rising in me of fundamental and unqualified life, and removed every shadow of dilemma and ignorance from the mind, on every level, and all its effects in the body. But I would have to pass through many years of trial before that understanding became the stable constant and premise of my being.

Even so, in the days and weeks that followed I grasped certain basic concepts that arose in me at that time and which stood out in the mind undeniably, with a self-validating force. Two things in particular stood out as fundamentals.

I had spent years devoted to forceful seeking for some revolutionary truth, some image, object, reason or idea whose effect would be absolutely liberating and salvatory. My seeking had been motivated by the loss of faith, the loss of the Christ-object and other such reasons for joy. But in that great moment of awakening I ::new the truth was not a matter of seeking. There were no reasons for joy and freedom. It was not a matter of a truth, an object, a concept, a belief, a reason, a motivation, or any external fact. Indeed, it was clear that all such objects are grasped in a state that is already seeking and which has already lost the prior sense of an absolutely unqualified reality. Instead, I saw that the truth or reality was a matter of the removal of all contradictions, of every trace of conflict, opposition, division or desperate motivation within. Where there is no seeking, no contradiction there is only the unqualified knowledge and power that is reality. This was the first aspect of that sudden knowledge.

In this state beyond all contradiction I also saw that freedom and joy is not attained, that it is not dependent on any form, object, idea, progress or experience. I saw that we are, at any moment, always and already free. I knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The problem was the seeking itself, which created and enforced contradiction, conflict and absence within. Then the idea arose that I am always already free. This was the second aspect of that fundamental awareness.

That sudden understanding was the obviation of all striving, and this I knew to be unqualified truth. I had been striving for some truth or joy to replace my loss, but this striving was itself the source of contradiction in me. Now I knew there was no entity of truth, and perfect freedom was always already the case. It exists as life, not when it is created or sought, but where there is this fundamental understanding. In that moment of understanding I had simply turned out of the context of my dilemma. I was possessed of the mature cognition of the "bright."

In the years that followed I would find many analogies for my experience in the spiritual literature of the East and West. I could call that revolution in myself "enlightenment," "liberation," "realization of the Self,"or "union with God." I would pursue the sciences of that realization in religion and yoga, in ancient Scriptures and modern therapeutic techniques. But always, as you will see, I returned to the simplicity of that understanding, free of all concepts, which, although they seek to express it in a communicative symbol, in fact serve to limit the state itself and recreate the milieu of seeking.

But I was not at that time living in a spiritual community. And the mind of the university, bound as it was to the subtle doctrines that enforce our dilemma, served only to counter my experience, just as when a child I no community of the "bright."

As a result of the vulnerability to which any kind of "spiritual" consciousness is subject in our traditionally revolutionary culture, I was unable at that time thoroughly to understand my own experience. I could not establish that consciousness as the creative premise of my existence. I was simply not that strong. And the habits of mind and body that I had built by years of self-exploitation persisted as consoling means of pleasure. So that I remained rather sedentary and reflective. I did not overcome the gravity of mind that I had achieved as a result of my dilemma and my way of life. And I naturally adapted to a basic misinterpretation of my experience.

I retained something of the attitude of the seeker, Whereas before I continually pursued some kind of objective truth, now I sought the removal of contradictions, of the parts of conflict, ignorance or impurity, by various internal means.

I did not realize that this understanding, this knowledge is itself the removal of contradictions and the instant, moment to moment purifier of the mind and life. I considered that the truth was as I had known it in that moment of consciousness, but that I would have to find the means for working the revolutionary purity of my being. I saw the state of knowledge or understanding to be in some sense caused by the practical removal of the impurities or contradictions in the mind and life.

Thus, I began a new period of effort. Its goals were not desperate and unreal as before, but the simple assumption of the attitude of the seeker, and the consequent identification with the one who is not yet radically free, not yet real and true, made it impossible for me to enjoy the continuous state of being that had been accomplished in that moment of realization.

The burden of these considerations made me feel that I had even lost the truth that I had realized. I began to pursue it again through endless writing and search. I remained addicted to my medium pleasures and sought through them the means of purification and release. I graduated from Columbia in the following year, in June, 1961, in despair and confusion, without a clue as to where I should take myself. Reluctantly, I had become a seeker, even a very ordinary seeker, but I was not certain there were any means in all the world to raise myself into the "bright."

Chapter 4
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