Montecito Capital
Big Sur
In the outdoor communal soaking baths of present day Esalen, with a view stretching out over the Pacific, in those porcelain clawfoot vessels of transcendence, one has to merely pull a lever a quarter turn and hot, healing, sulfurous water cascades all over your naked body. When you match the hot and cold, and the temperature is exactly right, you become the water itself. The water inside you, the water outside, the ocean in front, boundaries melt into nothingness. The me-it is gone. Emotion flows, pouring over the side of the cliff, to mix with the receptive vastness of the sea. Your insides are outsides, your exhale can just keep going forever out out out into the void at the horizon line, carrying you right along with it.
I am having a sunrise bath, reading Henry Miller, perhaps a common cliche in Big Sur, but I think with a smile more talk about him than read him, so I am okay. His mastery of language is the initial invitation, but as with all language, its potency fades. After a tumult of chapters, all descriptions of the characters in his Parisian life, with all the comedy and unpleasantness of humanity coming and going, his words all merge. What’s left over, a permanent gift that follows you home, is his honesty. And the only question that remains is if you can stomach it. With his books banned for decades for his racy content, people might mistakenly think he is obsessed with sex. But the when and the where in 1920s Paris, it’s just merely another feature of humanity. He describes it because it’s there, its what people were doing. His freedom is the freedom to write whatever life presents, beautiful, ugly and all in between. He is caustic without being mean. Skewering without being inhumane. His ultimate freedom is being honest with himself and others. It makes no difference if one is in his lifetime or in today’s Esalen. You deny one part of life and you deny it all. Honesty - the gateway to the mystic. Where one can live as a screen door, or even a spider’s intricate web, where everything- thoughts, feelings, time - just passes like the breeze right through, and maybe once in a while something creative catches.
I originally titled this A Breathe Twice Borrowed. Starting over, with my new life in California, with the requisite humbleness towards God the title implies. I was very self-satisfied with my own catchiness and the literary self-drama. But back to the water, it doesn’t notice our self-importance, literary or otherwise. A stream doesn’t decide to pick itself up and move elsewhere. It, like life, merely flows onwards. We are left with just a light, a gleam in the eye (if we are lucky) and words that will never be quite adequate for our purposes. Charlatans, fools and sometimes saints cross Henry Miller’s pages. The jester wins every time. Compassion and humor in the midst of this crazy, tragic life. For all your ills, I give you laughter.
Hot Springs Trail
I am sitting on a stone in the forest, wondering if the buzz flies will grant me enough respite to write. A breeze shoo’s them onward and the way is clear. I am on the Hot Springs Trail in Santa Barbara, California, halfway up, in no hurry. Some days, my body says charge it, it needs to push itself, but not today. A small white butterfly gently saunters by and I flit after it up the sun-dappled trail. Occasionally I look back and catch the sparkles off the ocean stretching out to the Channel Islands beyond. The stream splashes by next to me. Already a challenging morning and all that went with it, all fade a thousand years away. Everything has been said before, everything been done before, nothing left but endless footfalls one after another receding into time.
My teacher Gay Luce passed on last week. She founded the retreat program that taught me 90% of everything that currently matters to me. Before, she could just be in one place, now, she can be everywhere. And she is.
She taught me it is not enough to be lucid in this life, that we must train for death, to carry that lucidity across the threshold, in one last act of service. She was a bodhisattva, a term of honor for those who could choose enlightenment and release from the suffering of humanity and yet forego it to serve. She was brilliant, Harvard, Stanford, could have done anything she wanted and she chose to start a modern Mystery School to safeguard and tend the lineages of the worlds’ great wisdom traditions. When her eyes met yours, she transferred her sparkle to you. To mourn her is to be both profoundly sad and happy at the same time, without having to explain what that means. I always thought of her as otherworldly anyway so I am surprised at my grief at her passing. My emotions flow into the stream, eddying in the rocks.
After a time, I continue. Even at a meandering pace, the hike goes too quickly, and I reach the hot springs. Gay has cleared everyone out and its just me and the silent pools. I use what she taught me, open myself to a transmission of healing, to the energy and vibrations of the living sentience all around me. People nowadays talk a lot about quality of life. I was taught and have embraced that our time is spent either remembering our connectedness or forgetting it. The greater proportion of time we spend remembering rather than forgetting, the better our real quality of life. And if we are fated, if we are lucky, eventually we can train to merge with all, becoming something beyond ourselves: transmitters of this divinity all around us.
I ease into the scalding water, submerging a sore shoulder. I feel as calm and grounded as the rocks that encircle the pools. I float and think of myself as a seashell lazing in the tides. After a time there are voices downstream, a group approaches. I wish them well and am on my way, my smile leading me back downhill.
Control and Psychedelics
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is control.” - Richard Rohr
I grew up in a chaotic household with three brothers and loving but overmatched parents. I was basically on my own to figure out life and my hyper-analytic mind dove headlong into the task. Much of my subsequent spiritual training and seeking has targeted undoing the urge to master and control- whether my career, my environment, or my kids (I gave up on my wife to her credit years ago).
I want to protect my children and provide counsel to them so they can avoid the pain and struggle I experienced having had to do it alone myself all those years. There is a balance I find myself fine-tuning daily- when is it truly about them and when is it about me?
Our sympathetic nervous system is evolutionarily hard wired for survival. The temporary dismantling of this egoic default system is one of the most promising potential therapeutic advancements of psychedelic medicine. Patients are given a glimpse of nonduality- where they are not a separate entity elbowing their way through an alien external world but are rather a connected being to a ground state of Love. Their neuro-chemical ruts and in some cases ravines can be smoothed or rebalanced thus creating an opportunity for healing, transformation and evolution.
In many cases however, the magic runs ahead of the supervisors’ abilities to wield it. There becomes an idolatry for the substance that forms as a result to compensate for the secular priest’s own amateurism.
Going into the experience and coming out of it, if a dualistic reference frame is used, the plant medicine or chemical sits out there externally and “does something to us”, and when the journey is over, we are thrown back into our dualistic world, what can integration actually achieve? Six months later we will be suffering once more and needing another “experience”.
If instead, the participant is pre-trained in nondual experiences, can learn to be grounded enough to sit unafraid in their own presence, holding their small self intact while opening to their greater Self, connected and a witness to the transpersonal realms, psychedelics may be a more permanent tool of continual transformation. But the question remains, at that point would one even need it anymore? As a tailored arrow in the quiver perhaps, without a lot of the worship.
I have found in my own experiences a repeated message. Be calm. Abide in the benevolence. Surrender and live and laugh.
I have also found that subsequently, the egoic default system is rapacious. Consequently, without a daily awareness practice, despite however much nondual training one has been exposed to, without discipline, it will entropically fade. It is not enough, to use a Buddhist analogy, be a screen door in the wind, a non-clinging and non-averting witness to all that arises and falls away. That is only half the battle. The other half is a continuous, skillful and willful awareness jiu-jitsu to melt those moments of sympathetic nervous system ramps, and return back to a place of open hearted loving and compassion. For one’s spouse, kids, colleague, whomever.
A goal worthy of the most ardent striver.
“I do not fear the man who has practiced a thousand kicks once, I fear the man who has practiced one kick a thousand times.” - Bruce Lee
Sit alone for a full twenty minutes a day. Find one spot on your body (tip of your nose, fingertips of one hand, a foot on the floor) and hold your awareness there despite your mind’s attempts to repeatedly hijack your attention. It’s a lot harder than you think. At first, twenty minutes will seem absolutely interminable. To succeed, one must find joy in the struggle, which is also a wonderful metaphor for life. The mental forbearance and equanimity that results, as the parasympathetic system takes over, is well worth it. Practice your kick and become a warrior for kindness, both for self and other.
