I
re-visited an old self last night, one I had thought to have long ago
discarded. I was scrolling through movie selections on our Apple TV, intending
to watch Crazy Wisdom—the film about Chogyam Trungpa—for which I had already
paid and was for some reason unable to access a night or two before. For some reason, too, (no accidents!) I was unable to access it again last night, and instead happened upon One TrackHeart: The Story of Krishna Das.
I
had peviously known nothing of the music of this one-time love generation rock-n-roller
who is now well-known, even widely adored for performances and CDs that feature
mostly Hindu spiritual chanting which he refers to, with genuine joy, as
“singing with people.” The film is the story of his journey from that early
period of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, through years of disillusionment and
depression to his encounter with the Indian mystic, Maharaj-ji; and thence, on
his guru’s death, into a new, deep downward spiral ending in a severe crack cocaine
addiction, and a quasi-miraculous recovery into the spiritual life through re-dedication to the practice of his music. The final obstacle to overcome was, perhaps
not surprisingly, his ego.
It’s
a touching—and indeed a familiar story: smart, sensitive Western kid goes disastrously
astray and finds salvation in the religious traditions of the East. This particular story, a documentary film, features such luminaries as Ram Dass (whose own story bears remarkable similarities),
Lama Surya Das, and Sharon Salzberg along the way. Ram Dass, in
particular—himself a disciple of Maharaj-ji, was the primary source of Krishna
Das’s conversion back in the 1970s, and remains both his teacher and his enthusiastic fan to
this day. (After the major stroke
that felled him in 1997 and deprived him, for a long while, of speech and body
movement, Ram Dass looked and sounded remarkably like his old self in interviews
recorded for this film.)
All
of which took me back to that time, in the early 1970s, the early days of my
academic career, when students were coming to tell me that I “had to read” this
book—Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. They were telling me, also, with great enthusiasm,
about Alan Watts (The Way of Zen) and Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) and other great spiritual teachers of the
time. My students must have recognized in me a yearning that I was not able to
recognize myself, because I responded, at the time, with lofty intellectual
skepticism and what I can only describe, in all honesty, as a kind of emotional
repulsion. The images of chanting, happy people dancing in the meadows turned
me off. And though I’d had myself, some years earlier, one memorable experience
with LSD, I nursed a profound distrust of drugs and their supposedly liberating
effects. I did not believe that happiness could be found this way. Indeed, unaware
of the unhappiness in myself, I was unable to believe in happiness at all. The "heart" was a foreign concept. I
argued, to myself and anyone who would listen to my prejudices, that Eastern
religions belonged where they originated, in the East. They could not be
transplanted, and to embrace them seemed to me a kind of fundamental dishonesty.
The whole thing seemed false.
It
took me another 20 years before I was able to come to acknowledge the internal
conflict that perhaps my students had recognized and responded to. I was caught, unconsciously, on
the one hand between an intense desire for precisely the ideals that those
pioneers embodied: love, peace, happiness, and a truly open and embracing
spirit; and on the other hand a heavily self-protected ego that felt threatened
as much by freedom as by joy. It was this latter character I encountered yet
again last night as I watched “One Track Heart.” The same old judgment came up
as I watched the ecstatic singing and dancing, the blissful expression on the
faces of both the singer and his fans: “It’s phony.”
How wrong I was! I
feel blessed, now, to be able to watch that judgmental character with somewhat
less, um… judgment than heretofore. That’s what I had to work through to arrive
at the meditation practice I’ve been following for as many years as it took me
to discover the value of the “heart” that’s referred to in the movie’s title. I
had lived without it for years, rejecting with some anger the spiritual values
of my father’s religion and unable to find an acceptable substitute for it. My
“conversion” was provoked by a great personal, spiritual and emotional crisis
in my life and took me on a journey of intense inner turmoil.
Truthfully,
I must acknowledge that I have not yet arrived at the place of total bliss. I many never get there. There are still demons within, some known, some unknown. I have certainly not shed the
last vestiges of ego. As I noticed last night, my old selves—the ones who
served me ill—might suddenly reappear with savage, mocking grins, to remind me
there is still work to be done. But at least I can now say with honesty that I
recognize happiness to be an achievable goal in this life; I have come to believe
in the primacy of heart over brain, and that a generous, all-loving heart is the
path to the happiness we all seek. Thus far I have come. I still have far to
go.
1 comment:
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