by Mark Salzman
“Nothing.” After forty-five minutes I’d had enough of sitting there watching Scott grin. I decided to tell him that it was getting late and I wanted to head back. To make it realistic I made the gesture of looking at my watch. With my mouth opening to speak I suddenly stopped dead; my watch said 9:35 P.M. We had arrived at the spot at 9:30. It wasn’t possible.
I put the watch up to my ear, but it was still ticking. Scott started laughing.
“And so the lesson begins,” he observed. “Let’s do the Time Warp!”
His laughter did not reach me in the form of sound, but seemed to pour out of his throat like a warm, thick liquid that ran all over my body. The fire lit his face from below, and where his eyes and mouth should have been there were fathomless black holes. Instead of feeling afraid, I was overjoyed. It worked! The world was completely, utterly different from what it had been before. Come to think of it, I too was completely, utterly different from what I had been before. I felt like a ghost; I could sense my body, and was aware of my thoughts, but instead of the usual situation of feeling that “I” was those thoughts inside the head of that body, “I” was something invisible and with no will or intentions at all, in a separate dimension from even my own thoughts, hearing my thoughts as if they were coming out of a speaker in the center of my head.
“Look at the trees,” Scott said. I looked up and saw that the trees were arranged around us in a perfect sphere, a flawless bubble of leaves, with us at the absolute center. It was too perfect to be real, and yet it was real; I knew I wasn’t hallucinating because each of the separate leaves, branches and trunks looked normal. And I knew Scott hadn’t led me on purpose to this spot, because I had led him there. I had no idea what to make of it.
“How the hell did this happen?” I asked, honestly shocked. I’d read the Castaneda books too, but everybody knew they were just good fiction. What was going on?
“Nature is teaching us,” he said, looking around. “I think the lesson is that everything is a circle, and all points in a circle lead back to themselves, so everything is connected to everything else. What do you think?”
MY GOD! I thought, THIS IS INCREDIBLE! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE! EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED: THAT WAS THE MESSAGE OF TAOISM AND ZEN, THAT WAS THE MESSAGE OF RELATIVITY THEORY, THAT WAS THE MESSAGE OF QUANTUM PHYSICS. OH, MY GOD! THE TREES ARE SHOWING ME THAT IT’S TRUE!
All that Asian mysticism I’d read and tried to convince myself that I was understanding—no wonder I was always so disappointed! I didn’t understand anything! THIS was understanding, and it was a TOTALLY different kind of understanding from anything I’d ever felt before. Every philosophical concept I’d ever been interested in, instead of being an abstract theory that one had to slowly build up confidence in, had been instantaneously transformed into a physical, visible, audible, tangible concrete fact. No, it wasn’t philosophy, and no, it wasn’t enlightenment—it was reality! It was THIS! Enlightenment was only a name, only a word, only an intellectual idea I’d developed. This was REALITY, and now that I was perceiving it this way, it was obvious why people who’d had this vision couldn’t describe it or communicate it through words. Words were not the same as experience, and … OF COURSE! THAT’S WHY THE TAO THAT CAN BE TOLD IS NOT THE ETERNAL TAO! Because no verbal description of this could ever make someone feel this way!
“What’s your lesson?” Scott asked.
“OH, MY GOD! YOU’RE RIGHT! THIS IS A LESSON! OF COURSE YOU’RE RIGHT! WHY WOULD I HAVE EVER THOUGHT THAT THE WAY TO LEARN ABOUT REALITY WAS FROM BOOKS OR FROM OTHER PEOPLE? IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT REALITY YOU HAVE TO LEARN FROM REALITY! OH, MY GOD, SCOTT, THIS IS THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE MOMENT OF MY WHOLE LIFE! MY WHOLE LIFE WAS WORTH LIVING FOR THIS! I’M HERE AT LAST! OH, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!”
Scott laughed. “Don’t thank me, man. Thank your teacher. Let’s go look at the water.” It was midsummer and the water temperature was perfect. The night air had cooled down so that the water was exactly the same temperature. We pulled off our clothes and dived in, and I felt as if I had just jumped into a cosmic wormhole leading me through a black hole into an entirely different universe. As I swam I immediately started imagining what it must be like to be a fish. Then I realized, I AM A FISH! WE’RE ALL FISH! WE THINK THAT BECAUSE WE’VE EVOLVED INTO MAMMALS AND THEN HUMANS THAT WE’RE DIFFERENT, BUT WE’RE STILL RELATED JUST LIKE I’M RELATED TO MY BROTHER!
I felt convinced that I was not merely imagining what it felt like to be a fish, but was actually having a genetically encoded memory of what I really had felt like when I had been a fish—no, billions and billions of fish, millions of generations of them over millions and millions of years. Go back further, I thought. I stopped swimming and let myself float. I was a single-celled animal now. Further, further. I was a leaf of seaweed. Trillions and trillions of leaves, I was the seaweed all over the world. Then I became the organic molecules that had evolved into seaweed. Then I was the minerals in the water, the dissolved salt … and then I was the water. A drop of pure water. A lake full of pure water. Stillness, pure, clear stillness. Then I was the—
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! SPLASH! AAAAAAA AAA! GASP COUGH GASP WHATSGOINGON-WHAT? WHO? WHEREAMI? WHE … OH … Oh … oh. Oh. Sorry, man. What’s going on?”
Somewhere around changing from a fish into kelp I had relaxed into a blissful dead man’s float. Scott, as he had promised, was keeping a friendly eye on me. Time, being relative, made it appear to him that I had been floating like that for a long time, which led him into a bit of a reverie of his own where he imagined that I was one of the victims of the Titanic. When he finally remembered that it was me and that he was my Reality Park Ranger for the night, responsible for keeping me out of trouble, he thought he’d better tap me on the back to check on me. Imagine being all the water on earth one moment, and then feeling a tap. A tap where? What’s this? Having a sensation at all came as a surprise to me, so it was understandable that I reacted so violently.
“I just had another lesson!” I spluttered to the best friend I’d ever had.
“Great, great! Why don’t we, uh, go ashore now and you can tell me all about it.” I think I might have spoiled Scott’s lesson for the evening, because he seemed a bit subdued after that.
I told Scott the entire story of evolution from the point of view of someone who had been there. Then I told him the entire story of my life, marveling at the parallels between evolution on the macro and micro scales. I must have talked for quite a while because I noticed Scott shivering, and then I realized that our roaring campfire had burned down to nothing but embers. Then I noticed how dark it was. I’d never realized how dark darkness was until then, and yet I could see everything—how could I see everything? The leaves and trees—hey, they weren’t in a perfect circle anymore. How the …? Then I realized that it had been our campfire. It had lit the nearest leaves more brightly and the farther ones less so, which made it appear that we were in a bubble of foliage, when actually we were just in the bubble of light. Ah, of course. But still, how come I see it all now? Ah, the moonlight. Of course. I guessed that I was coming down.
Looking at the moon reminded me of astronomy, and I looked beyond it to the stars. All those stars, so far away. So far away! The distances! THE DISTANCES! HERE WE GO AGAIN, OHMYGOD!
“SCOTT, DO YOU KNOW IF YOU COULD GET INTO A SPACESHIP AND DRIVE THROUGH SPACE AT FIFTY-FIVE MILES AN HOUR, HOW LONG IT WOULD TAKE YOU TO GET TO THE CLOSEST STAR?”
“Cool out! You don’t have to yell, I’m right here! How long would it take?”
“Fifty-two million years!” I whispered.
“Whoa! How do you know that?”
“My dad’s into astronomy.”
“You don’t have to whisper either, man, everything’s cool.”
“There are over a hundred billion galaxies in the universe! Think about that, man! That is like … that’s just like, whoa! Man, Scott, I never understood the word ‘whoa’ before! Never like this!”
“Oh, yea
h, weed is whoa, man. That’s one of the first lessons.”
“No no, it’s not weed that’s whoa, it’s this! You know what I’m talking about? This experience. This moment, man! Thisness!”
“You’re right! No, no, actually, this isn’t whoa; it’s that weed brings you and this together, and whoa is the state of consciousness that’s the result. It’s … I got it, it’s the State of Whoa. Because all of this is mind, man, it’s all mind. Like the Zen monks who were arguing, is it the flag moving, or is it the wind moving, and the Zen master came up and said, ‘You’re both wrong, you idiots, it’s—”
“Your mind moving!” we said in perfect unison. He’d read exactly the same Zen books I had! We were soul mates!
“Whoa!” we cried together, then laughed hysterically until our stomachs hurt.
As far as I was concerned, the evening was a success of infinite proportions. Inspired by my lengthy recitation of mind-bending astronomical facts, Scott told me about a book he’d read called The Tao of Physics. The book, he told me, was about subatomic particles, and how our Western scientists are only now having to acknowledge that Asian philosophers were right about the illusory nature of reality and the interconnectedness of everything, but the establishment just didn’t want to acknowledge it. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that book and show it to my dad. I told Scott about the time my dad defended the “normal” modern, uptight state of mind as being perfectly natural because, he’d argued, anything that comes out of the brain is natural. Scott was impressed.
“Your dad’s a cool guy,” he said, nodding respectfully; “he’s right about that.” Then he stuck a finger in the air. “But he missed something there! Every state of mind is natural, which means that so is this one, so you can’t say this is ‘worse’ than the uptight version. And if you had the freedom to choose, which you do, which would you choose?”
What would it be? The State of Whoa, or my dad’s world—the State of Joe? The State of Whoa, man. It was so obvious. All my life I had wanted euphoria, intensity, a sense of fulfillment, of being completely engaged in life, and at last I’d found it.
“Uh … Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you hit the lesson about hunger by any chance?”
“No, what lesson is that?”
“Lowlifes call it the munchies. It’s when you gotta eat, man.”
“No, man, I’m not hungry at all! Say, you want to know how long it would take to drive a car to the Globular Cluster in Hercules?”
“Uh, sure, but maybe on our next journey, OK? I gotta get something to eat. You OK to go home now?”
“Sure, no problem.”
Scott and I shook hands—it was a profound handshake; so much was communicated without our saying anything—and parted. It was a profound parting, the way we turned and didn’t look back even though we were still in each other’s sight. I’d never realized how ritualistic parting was; you’d think people would always walk backward in order to see each other till the last possible moment, but they don’t. Somewhere along the line cavemen had made the arbitrary decision to turn their backs when they parted and then they stuck to it because … well, actually, if they had walked backward, I realized, they couldn’t have seen where they were going, and could have gotten hurt stumbling into a mammoth or something.
I walked home, every step a step closer to the place of my childhood, to my parents (they’d actually made me! Whoa!) and to my brother and sister. How I wanted to tell them all how much more I appreciated them now! When I reached the house I crept through it, looking at every piece of furniture, every musical instrument, every one of my dad’s paintings and every photograph as if for the first time. This was where it had all begun. I could look at any object and instantly have a memory involving it flash into view. Everything was complete, everything had played an important part, everything was interconnected.
I went down into the basement and pulled out my cello. I started playing it, and I played as I never had before. Every note was perfect. I could do no wrong! I didn’t have to bother with tempo or pitch at all; that was all in the past. This was the music of the spheres.
My door opened and I froze. “Mark, can I ask what the hell you’re doing?” It was Dad.
“I … uh …”
“It’s three o’clock in the morning, Mark. Do you mind?”
“Sorry, sorry …”
I lay down and closed my eyes. For some reason I remembered a poster that a childhood friend of mine had in his bedroom. It read: TODAY IS THE TOMORROW YOU WORRIED ABOUT YESTERDAY. NOW YOU KNOW WHY.
The words whirled around in my head and rearranged themselves, with a few changes along the way, then appeared in front of me like this: TODAY IS THE TOMORROW I WISHED FOR YESTERDAY. NOW I KNOW WHY. I’d really SEEN. And the best part of it was that I could go to sleep with utter peace of mind, knowing that I had not gone crazy, had not gotten caught and was not going to become an addict, because I knew I would never have to do it again. Now that I had SEEN this way, and now that I UNDERSTOOD so much, it could never be taken away from me.
14
The next day I woke up around one in the afternoon. I went upstairs, made some toast and sat in the living room. I felt kind of crappy. My mother passed by me without looking at me. Oh my God, could she tell? Did she know? I told myself not to panic, that she was just annoyed that I’d gotten up so late. Our rule since I’d turned sixteen was that on weekends, because I stayed up much later than she did, she had to wait until I’d gotten up on my own before going down to practice.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked her. I had all sorts of new theories about the origins of the universe that I wanted to run past him. He didn’t have to know exactly how the theories had been inspired.
“Joe is uptown getting oil. First he had to go to the dump, then he has to change the oil in both cars, then he has to mow the lawn.”
The subtext, communicated via the tension in her voice, was that Dad had been working all morning while I was sleeping. If I didn’t get up off my ass and start doing something helpful fast, I was going to be in the doghouse all weekend. In spite of having passed from the ordinary sad world into the Incomparable State of Whoa only a few hours before, I was feeling strangely grouchy. Instead of taking her cue and offering to do some chore, or at least reassuring her by practicing some classical music for a change instead of spending all my time doodling in G major, I stomped out of the house and sat in the dead Triumph.
Wait a minute, I thought, this is ridiculous. Didn’t I leave this bullshit behind me? What happened to the State of Whoa? I closed my eyes and tried to bring it back, but failed. I was back in the State of Joe, except that it was a bit worse than usual because my head ached. As I sat there in the rusting car, marveling at how difficult it was to concentrate on anything, my dad pulled into the driveway. I felt happy to see him; I was looking forward to an afternoon of metaphysical discussion. Maybe then I would slip back into the proper frame of mind.
But as soon as he climbed out of the bus I could see he wasn’t in any mood for metaphysics. He hated driving uptown, he hated changing the oil and he hated mowing the lawn. Maybe I should offer to mow the lawn for him, I thought. But then I remembered how fatigued and headachy I felt and decided, no, I think I’ll go down to the lake.
I found the ashes of our campfire from the night before. It was hard to believe this was the same spot that had been so magical; everything looked so disappointingly ordinary. I tried wading into the water, but my feet were unusually sensitive to the sharp sand, the slimy algae and the beer-bottle caps. And the water was cold and kind of dirty. I tried to retrace the steps of my insights, beginning with the fish experience, but instead of tapping into my genetically encoded memories, I felt cold and self-conscious.
I walked around the neighborhood and everything bothered me in the same way. The sounds of lawn mowers, the bits of discarded paper, plastic and metal along the side of the road, the muggy weather, the mosquitoes, the flies, the smel
l of asphalt and even the trees. The trees all looked so … so bland. Why couldn’t we have anything really unusual like palm trees or Monterey pines? Why did I have to spend my whole life in Connecticut?
Bummer. I never really knew the meaning of that word until now. It wasn’t worth it; this was too depressing. I vowed never to mess with dope again.
The next day I felt better and went back to my routine of playing along to the stereo in the afternoon and going out at night. As the days passed, my memories of “the day after” began to fade, whereas my curiosity about Whoaness increased. After two weeks it was all I could think about. I couldn’t see any reason why the intellectual perspective couldn’t be transferred into one’s normal, sober life. Maybe if I got stoned and made that the subject of my mental explorations, I could use my superior powers of insight to figure out how to make the transfer. Good idea! Once more couldn’t hurt, and as Mr. Leighton implied in the conversation we’d never had in the faculty lounge, teenagers almost have to sacrifice a few brain cells on their path to adulthood—it’s been a universal rite of passage since the dawn of mankind, hasn’t it? The wise Native Americans, after all, made their youths fast for days, sit in overheated saunas, hang themselves from bloody hooks passed through their chests or chew mescal buttons in order to have the kind of hallucinations deemed necessary for the passage to adulthood. You can bet those noble braves lost a few neurons along the way, boy.
I spoke to Scott about it and asked if he could give me enough pot for just one more lesson. He obliged, so I stopped by Ye Olde Head Shoppe, picked up a little pipe and some matches, and drove straight out to the lake to get things right.
WHOA! HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN THIS? IT’S SO SIMPLE, SO OBVIOUS, SO UNDENIABLE, SO PERMANENT!
Bummer. I’ll never do this again.
But I did, and then a fourth time, and then I decided that it must be like medication for depression; you had to do it steadily over a certain period of time before it really sank in. Whoa! Bummer. Whoa! Bummer. Whoa! Bummer.