by Pete Holmes
The essence couldn’t live with the story line any longer.
The light couldn’t live with the bulb any longer.
And when you put it that way, the crisis—whatever it may be—loses some of its power. The light is complaining about the bulb? Ram Dass is inviting us to step outside our dramas, to see it all as lila and witness ourselves from our true beings. Look! It’s just your ego! It’s just your story line! It’s just a bulb!
When I’m planted in my soul—in my pure Awareness—watching the events of my life unfold is a lot like watching Breaking Bad. When I watch that show, I freak the fuck out. I’m tense, I’m anxious, I’m clutching a pillow and shouting at the screen. I’m passionately involved, deeply invested. Especially that episode where Hank is about to get shot by those two twin assassin guys and he’s fumbling to reload his gun with bloody fingers? Holy shit! I was barely breathing.
But still. Behind it all, I knew. My life’s not in danger. I’m not Hank. I’m the guy on the couch. Invested in the show, yes, but detached. As exciting as this very important drama is to me, I know I’m only lending my attention to it.
Rammy D calls this being passionately involved yet detached. You’re still in it, whatever it is, but you’re also keeping some energy inside like a candle flame that isn’t disturbed by the blowing winds of your life. This reduces a great deal of suffering.
Remembering that my soul has no real interest in whether or not we make it to the IMAX movie early enough not to have to sit in the front row, remembering my soul has no real interest in my public humiliations, or my victories, or what I’m having for lunch—it’s on the couch—was a truly liberating idea.
Christ told us to be in the world but not of the world. Growing up evangelical, I took this to mean, “See people going to R-rated movies and smoking cigarettes and sleeping in on Sundays, but don’t be one of them. Be a Christian.” Like, we’re at your party, but we won’t eat the onion dip. But what it really means, I think, is, “Go ahead, live in the world. Make mistakes, get your heart broken, lose your job, fight with your mother, eat the fucking onion dip . . . Just don’t forget who you are.”
Who you actually are—you, the Witness behind what’s happening.
Be in the world, but don’t drown in it. Don’t believe the hype. As Bill Hicks said: “It’s just a ride.” So enjoy it. Whatever’s happening.
After all, our favorite episodes of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones are when something happens. Good or bad. Because we know this will push the character. This will lead to growth, or change, or loss. And we love it.
We know that for these characters, pain is the vehicle that takes them from where they are to where they’re afraid to but need to go. But in our own lives, we resist when something happens. Why? I think it’s because maybe we’ve gotten lost in bulb identification.
But the deeper you get into soul consciousness, the more you can look at the follies and trials and pains of your life as what they really are: good episodes.
Boyfriend cheated on you?
Good episode.
Backstabbed by your best friend?
Woah. We have to watch the next one.
Feeling numb in the midst of your dreams coming true?
Oooh man, how’s he gonna get outta this?!
When I’m in a tight spot, the quickest way to make myself laugh and gain a new perspective is by asking myself, I wonder what’s going to happen to Pete?
Having the experiences and the sensations but not identifying with them is at the core of Ram Dass’s message. He teaches that instead of saying, “I’m depressed,” you could say, “There is depression.” Like, I’m over here, looking at it. Wow. That’s a heavy one. I don’t know if people get out of depressions like that one. But he asks, “Is the part of you that’s noticing the depression depressed?” In other words, is your Awareness depressed? If not, part of spiritual practice is to slide into that part of yourself, identify with it, and relax.
I know your pain is real. Mine is, too. But it’s going to come. Shame and loss and grief are all on their way. Some small, some big. Ram Dass isn’t saying not to feel it, or that it’s pleasant. He’s just telling us one way to look at it when it’s here—good episode—and that we can greet it like we would a tree—yes, thank you.
We love when Don Draper gets fired in Mad Men because we can’t wait to see where he ends up. The trick is to learn to love your own complications as the strange grace that they are. It can take a long time to be able to look back on a trauma and see it this way. When my wife left me, I certainly did not see it as a good episode, and I would’ve been deeply insulted if someone had tried to tell me that that was what it was. But there I was, years later, making a show that hinged on that shitty thing happening to me, and in the middle of the second season, I started to be able to look back on that event and see how it carried me into the next and necessary stage of my life.
The depersonalized experience of writing Crashing, acting it, editing it, then letting everyone see it, was deeply surreal, and it helped me gain perspective on the suffering. In my case, I didn’t know that the awful day where my wife finally broke the news of her affair to me was a good episode until it literally became one.
falling slowly
THE MONTHS IN BETWEEN SEASONS TWO AND THREE were slow and sweet and easy. Val and I made sure to take time to enjoy each moment, to meditate, to study, and to spend as much time in nature as we could before going back to the concrete landscape of Brooklyn determined to, this time, hold on to what it is we had learned.
We even had a new ritual: a monthly residency at the famous Los Angeles theater Largo, and I felt for the first time that I had found my true creative home as a stand-up.
Largo is a perfect theater, but even better than that, its backstage is warm and accommodating and friendly. There’s twinkle lights, and oriental rugs, and mismatched coffee mugs, cookies and red wine. The best part of the theater is the owner, a barrel-chested Irishman named Mark Flanagan—Flanny—whose taste, humor, and warmth are enough to coax even the most elusive performers to become Largo regulars.
Each month, Flanny would pack my show with names I could have never gotten on my own: Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman, Jon Brion, the Avett Brothers, John C. Reilly, Colin Hay, Lena Dunham, people who might be too busy or too spent to perform in their off time, but who will all do it for Flanny. One day, I casually told him about my love for the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard and the movie Once, the film I had cried to alone in a movie theater on the road. Sure enough, Flanny managed to book Glen to play one of my shows, which was not only a highlight of my career but also led to one of the craziest moments of my life.
GLEN HANSARD WAS, AS I EXPECTED, SWEET AND KIND and present. His immense warmth gives him a somewhat otherworldly feel, like a saint who answers the prayers of children asking for snow on Christmas Eve. He’s a delight. Backstage before the show, he and Val and I even sang a few songs together just for fun, waiting for the show to start. It was what both Val and I had always dreamed of, that sort of spontaneous camaraderie that seems to be prevalent in the pubs of Ireland but is so hard to come by in our stupid, isolated, ego-driven LA car culture. We sang “The Auld Triangle,” each taking a verse, missing only pints of dark beer, as Flanny filmed it with his iPhone. Afterward, amazed at what had happened, Val and I jumped up and down in the hallway and tried to figure out if it was possible to frame a video.
It was already too much—a dream come true. And then I got to go onstage and do my stand-up for a sold-out crowd. I closed with how much Once and Glen’s music had meant to me after my wife had left—feeling like a sinking boat, finding catharsis. Then I welcomed Glen to the stage. People went nuts. We hugged and I scurried back behind the curtain to sit next to Val from the sidestage, the best imaginable seats to see him play. I felt exactly as I had watching Once, fighting back tears as Glen sang his broken heart out, wailing and hitting notes impossible to hit unless you’re feeling what you felt when you wrot
e them.
Then something even more incredible happened.
The crowd cheered as Glen started to play the chords to his Academy Award–winning hit from the movie, “Falling Slowly.” I lit up, ready to get in a smaller, happier cry, when, to my surprise, Glen turned his head and looked over in our direction. “Do you want to sing it with me?” Glen said. My heart skipped a beat. Was this really happening? Glen was asking me to sing his most famous duet with him, and as I walked back onto the stage, my face was lit up and frozen in a smile that felt as wide as my shoulders.
The next two minutes were a blur. We sang in unison, both of us doing the lead vocal as neither of us was used to singing the harmony, and when the chorus hit, I closed my eyes and belted it as hard as I could. I was somewhere else. Even I was surprised when I hit the falsetto of “ti-ime,” but there it was. I was singing with one of my heroes. Not only that, I was singing his biggest hit, a song that had won an Oscar, a song that had helped me in my darkest moment. I had gone from sitting alone crying in a movie theater to standing onstage with a packed house singing with the very man himself.
I completely left my body.
As the last chord rang out, the crowd cheered, knowing exactly what this all had meant to me. I wasn’t the sad divorcé in the movie theater anymore, I was onstage, under the lights, feeling the love. I put my hands up in celebration like a first-place marathoner crossing the finish line and gave Glen one more hug.
As the applause faded, Glen turned to me and said, into the microphone, “I meant Val.”
Oh, fuck!
The crowd erupted into laughter. Pow. A ten out of ten. Of course! “Falling Slowly” is a duet, a famous duet, for a man and a woman, not a man and another gargantuan, sweaty man. He wanted to sing it with Val! My lovely wife with the lovely voice that would’ve merged and melted into his just perfectly, not my voice, loud and wet, raspy from yelling my stupid punchlines, drowning his out. What was I thinking?!
I turned stop sign red.
“You meant Val?!” I asked, turning to look at her watching from the wings. The crowd was still laughing, but my heart sank. Oh, no! Poor Val. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life trying to make this moment up to her. But how? I was in a hummingbird panic.
But when I looked over to her, Val was as bright as the sun. She was delighted, and joyful, and laughing her ass off. As I left the stage for Glen to play one more song—alone this time—I ran to her and immediately gave her an apologetic, embarrassed hug and pleaded with her to forgive me for robbing her of this incredible moment.
“No, no, no!” she managed to say, in between laughs. “That was way better than anything I could’ve asked for!”
I melted. This was my girl. My safe space.
In that moment she could’ve been furious with me, or teased me, or yelled. I felt like I had in junior high, just an out-of-place, loud, wet fart, ready to be shamed. But my sunshine was delighted. “I just got to watch my favorite person sing with his hero,” Val said, “and now we have that story for life.”
She’s right. We’ve told that story dozens of times, watching our friends laugh at the perfect example of how a ham like me needs to find a home like Val.
retreating further
BY THIS POINT, MY PRACTICE WAS GETTING STRONGER, and I had more friends who were trying to walk the same path, and learned that some of those friends had gone to Ram Dass’s house for a “personal retreat”—a six-day visit, one-on-one. Walking in the woods with Val one day, it hit me all at once that Ram Dass wasn’t going to be around forever and I may have been sleeping on the opportunity to spend a week with the most influential teacher of my life. I had to go. Given how the dates worked, though, if I went, Val would be thirty-four weeks pregnant—incredibly happy news in our life, but I wasn’t sure it would be okay for me to go on a six-day trip to Hawaii at that point in her pregnancy. But in a move that both didn’t surprise me and still overwhelmed me with love, Val insisted that I go.
I knew it was dangerous to meet your heroes—I’ve avoided meeting Steve Martin for the same reason—but I knew I had more to do with this man than our brief visit at the group retreat. I felt like we had work to do. Plus, as I told a few of my spiritual friends that I was planning on going but I didn’t have any high hopes of finding a guru out of the deal, two beautiful Buddhist teachers told me separately that they thought that Ram Dass wasn’t just going to show me my guru, but that Ram Dass was my guru. I resisted the idea, but I was definitely curious. Maybe even a bit hopeful. I wanted a guru, and I loved Ram Dass. And just like that, my intention of having no intentions started slipping away from me.
I was nervous. Ram Dass had become a symbol of great hope deep in my psyche, like Batman, and just as I couldn’t handle Batman flicking a lit cigarette at me and telling me to scram, I started to worry, What if Ram Dass hates me? Or, worse, what if I hated him? I’d be where he eats, and poops, and he might be in a bad mood, or hangry, or not feel like entertaining another needy guy in from the mainland staring at him, hoping for answers. His books and lectures meant so much to me, I couldn’t afford to lose all that precious content the way you can lose a great band or restaurant after a breakup.
What’s worse, the people I knew who had gone on this retreat all said they’d experienced nothing short of magic. They all used words like “transformative” and “impossible to put into language,” like the quotes on a poster for some sold-out Broadway show. Their stories were peppered with moments when Ram Dass seemed to really connect with them and, frankly, like them, giving them an extra dollop of special wonder.
What if it didn’t work for me?
IT WAS HOT WHEN I DEPLANED IN MAUI, AND VERY humid, so as I was waiting for the rental car shuttle I took my socks off in public, like an embarrassing dad, and slipped my bare feet back into my cloth travel clogs, like an embarrassing mom. Moments later, a married couple recognized me from Crashing, and we chatted briefly about comedy as I tried to hide the bulge of two sweaty, wadded-up socks I was keeping in my front pocket like a fucking loon.
As I got in my rental car, my phone stopped working, like the first act of a horror movie, so I had to drive GPS-less, like a frontiersman, looking for the small green mile-marker that signaled the left I was to take off the Hana Highway toward his property. I knew I’d found the place when I saw a driveway with a road sign with one way written in sparkle letters and decorated with a picture of Maharaj-ji holding up one finger. Holy shit, I thought. I’m actually here.
The grounds were beautiful, and comfortable, and as I parked I was immediately greeted by Dassi Ma, Ram Dass’s mai-tai-removing assistant, who gave me a big hug and hung one of those Hawaiian necklaces that look like they’re made of chestnuts, but they’re not chestnuts, around my neck. “I think they’re plastic,” she joked, then warmly invited me into the house for a quick tour.
The house was big and lovely and very familiar to me because I’d recently become obsessed with a Netflix movie shot there called Ram Dass, Going Home. There were numerous photos of Maharaj-ji, paintings of Maharaj-ji, and many, many statues of Hanuman. There was no AC, just plenty of open windows and an audible Hawaiian breeze. I said hello to Ram Dass’s caregivers, Lakshman and Govinda, whom I had met at the group retreats, and a cat and a playful puppy, both with Hindu names.
Dassi led me across the lush Maui lawn—grass thick like corn husks—and to the guesthouse attached to the garage, warning me that my living quarters were “a bit hippie” and that there were “most likely bugs.” I lowered my expectations, but as we entered, I found it even nicer than I’d hoped—open, airy, and warm, like a bungalow I imagined Matthew McConaughey might live in to relax between movies while also maintaining his carefree, open-shirt image. There were two main rooms: a bedroom with a bookshelf stuffed with spiritual books, including most of the Ram Dass ones weighing down my luggage, and a modest kitchen–living room with an electric stove, a nice couch, and a long, ornate puja table, or altar, crowded with candles, stat
ues, and pictures of saints, some familiar to me and some not.
The guesthouse, just like Ram Dass’s own home, was decorated with photos of Maharaj-ji: smiling Maharaj-ji, lounging Maharaj-ji, Maharaj-ji wrapped in a blanket, Maharaj-ji with a beard, Maharaj-ji rocking just a ’stache. I smiled and nodded to Ram Dass’s guru, searching, just as I’d done at the group retreats, for warmth in his eyes. In some of the photos he looked happy, but in others he seemed to be bordering on stern.
Dassi Ma let herself out, saying before she went, “You’ll see Ram Dass at some point tomorrow,” and closed the door. It was eleven a.m., and I had nothing to do. The previous four months of shooting of Crashing, every moment of every day had been not just filled but overstuffed with things to do, decisions to make, and people to talk with, and now all I had in my schedule was a meeting with Ram Dass the next day “at some point.”
It felt amazing.
I TOOK THE SOCKS OUT OF MY POCKET AND SAT ON the back patio in the shade. I melted into the afternoon, surprised at how unboring it was to just watch the wind blow through the overgrown trees, their heavy leaves rustling like a crackling fire or a gentle rain. I crossed the lawn and walked to the pool, touching as I passed the handicapped chair that lowers my hero into it, and jumped in, sinking myself into my new home for the next week. I swam a few lazy, underwater laps between the statue of Ganesh—I think?—at the deep end and the statue of the ubiquitous monkey god in the shallow, and felt a wave of bliss come over me, the light kaleidoscoping off the blue water looking more beautiful than it ought to.
I had to remind myself not to mistake just simply being in Hawaii for spiritual revelation. A flower fell into the pool from the trees above, one of those small white Hawaiian ones with the little yellow centers, like a floral dish filled with liquid butter for you to dip your crab in. I picked it up between three fingers, smiled, exhaled deeply, and wondered, How on earth did I get in Ram Dass’s pool?