The Great Good Thing

by Andrew Klavan

  One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You’re doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You’re doing great, intellectuals! You’re doing great.

  Much as Freudian-style therapy was helping me, I wanted something more. My research into Christianity had given me a lot of respect for its tragic vision of love. In the Bible, and in the minds of great theologians, Christ represented Love Despised, Love Rejected, Love Crucified in the world. That was a love I could believe in. It was in keeping with the things I saw around me. But it was a love that was ultimately triumphant in the miracle of the resurrection and in the hope of faith. And I did not have faith, and I did not believe in miracles. Church doctrines seemed absurd to me. Born of a virgin. Resurrected from the grave. Coming in glory to judge the living and the dead. I could not buy into any of it.

  To get around that roadblock, I tried the nondoctrinal Universalist church for a while—the “Church of Amorphous Rambling,” in which I’d been married. But the church experience itself was alienating to my contrarian artist’s soul. The ferociously radical-to-the-death Jesus of the Gospels was transformed here into a bland cheerleader for socially acceptable niceness. That made no sense to me. No one ever got himself crucified for organizing a charity golf tournament. As one friend, a lapsed believer, said to me of the church experience, “The services are pretty. It’s the tuna casserole of it all I can’t stand.”

  I couldn’t stand the tuna casseroles either. I stopped going to church.

  Instead, I came to zen and, through zen, I had my next epiphany—or satori, as the zen folks call it. The word is sometimes translated as sudden enlightenment or awakening, but my old friend Jack Kerouac wonderfully rendered it “a kick in the eye.” That’s what it was for me.

  Zen, by definition, is impossible to define. The path that can be spoken of is not the true path, and all that. The legend goes that the practice even began in silence, with the Buddha’s famous Flower Sermon. Siddhartha held up a white lotus to his followers and said . . . absolutely nothing. No one understood him, except one disciple, who smiled. And with that smile, zen began.

  It’s really more a practice than a philosophy. Basically, you sit cross-legged and focus on nothing but your breath. This is called zazen, seated meditation. Sometimes as you sit, you count your breaths as an aid to concentration. Sometimes you focus on a koan, a sort of riddle that serves as a spur to enlightenment. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was your original face before you were born? That sort of thing. Ultimately, you sit there and try to think nothing. Thoughts arise. You let them go. Monsters from your unconscious rear up. You release them. You enter a zone of mental emptiness.

  All of this is supposed to lead to a breakthrough—satori, enlightenment—which leads to pure consciousness and awareness without inner interpretation, which, in turn, gives rise to a sense that what you thought was reality is nothing more than an illusion. The way is easy, as one zen master put it. Don’t seek the truth. Just let go of all your opinions.

  Zen appealed to me because it seemed to offer a way to achieve what I had tried to achieve in childhood: a method of breaking free of the fog of daydreams and inner voices to see reality as it was. It was zen I had been trying to invent when I was eight years old, and now I had found it waiting for me. All I had to do was sit and breathe.

  Now, of course, there is no competition in zen. You can’t seek to do it better than anyone else. You can only sit. You can only breathe. There’s no way to be good or bad at it. But oh brother, let me tell you, I was great at it! I could sit and breathe with the best of them. I cracked koans like they were walnuts. If you wanted to know the sound of one hand clapping, you only had to ask me. Your original face before you were born? No problem; I knew. I was an all-around World Champion Zazen Guy, no question. I’m convinced to this day that only an unreasoning prejudice against Western dilettantes kept me out of the Zen Hall of Fame.

  The effect of meditation on me was wonderful too. At this time, due to budget cuts, I had been laid off from my job at the movie studio. I had found work writing news for a radio station located in Times Square. It was high-pressure work, churning out copy under half-hour deadlines from about three in the morning to around ten. When I was done for the day, I would come home and play with my daughter for an hour or so. Then I’d work for four hours at my own writing. Then I’d read from my stacks of books for two hours. Then I’d sleep a few hours; then I’d start the round again. I was constantly exhausted, constantly in motion, and often in severe pain: overdosing on coffee gave me an excruciating urinary infection that lasted for months.

  But through my zen meditation, I remained focused and clearheaded as never before. The other newswriters and I would sometimes entertain ourselves between broadcasts by playing games of wastepaper basketball, tossing crumpled pieces of wire copy at the trash basket for a quarter a throw. Zen so sharpened my mind that I couldn’t miss. I would frequently come home with my pockets bulging with change. It wasn’t exactly enlightenment, but it was a legitimate ten- or fifteen-dollar add-on to my take-home pay. Finally, my colleagues caught on and the basketball games ended.

  I would not only practice zen while sitting but also while walking around the city. I would clear my mind and focus on the buildings, the traffic, the trees, pavement, scenery, and faces—just as I had done as a boy trying to beat my daydream addiction. This time, with the aid of zazen breathing, I learned how to overcome the mind’s resistance to emptiness. The city scenery grew clearer to me. I became more alert and aware.

  Then one day, I was walking up Fifth Avenue. I was on that beautiful stretch along the border of Central Park where the hexagonal pavement stones lie shaded under the canopied branches of plane trees. I don’t remember exactly where I was or where I was headed. Perhaps I was passing Temple Emmanuel on 65th Street. Perhaps it was the sight of that grand Romanesque Revival synagogue that suggested something to me. I don’t know. I just know that all at once, two words spoke themselves into my consciousness:

  No God.

  And with that: satori! Or some dabbler’s version of it anyway. Suddenly, my mind stopped. The chatter in my mind, the internal conversations, the reflections, the value judgments, the opinions, the daydreams, the very sense of myself—they all vanished on the instant. The static of consciousness shut off and the avenue came into focus like turning a lens. Colors became gloriously sharp and clear. The green of the budding leaves, the brown of the branches, the silver-gray of the paving stones, the blurred yellow of the passing cabs, the white clouds, the blue sky—they were so vibrantly and entirely there that I was breathless. I continued up Fifth Avenue awestruck, looking all around me, like a child at his first fair. Reality had become a wonderland.

  Wherever I’d been headed, I forgot it now. I simply strolled on, enjoying the stridently vivid scenery. Whenever the clarity began to fade, whenever the noise of my mind started up again, I had only to reignite the experience with the same words that had begun it:

  No God.

  Soon I realized I was approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How perfect. How beautiful the paintings would appear to my heightened consciousness. I went in and wandered the halls of the European galleries. Sure enough, the Christs and the Virgins and the pagan gods and the landscapes and the still-lifes seemed nearly three-dimensional with pure presence.

  It was here in the museum, after another half hour or so, that the rush of
awareness finally began to recede. The kick in the eye was over. Life became only life again.

  What was I to make of this then? No God? Atheism? Was that the secret to enlightenment? It seemed the very antithesis of my epiphany in the delivery room and yet the experience was just as real. For an hour or so on Fifth Avenue and in the museum, I had stumbled onto something like the clarity and presence I had been seeking on my walk to school when I was eight years old. And it had all started with that one revelation: no God. Even after it was over, I only had to speak those words to myself, and I would get a taste of that clarity again.

  Given that my idea of spirituality was not necessarily supernatural, atheism made a certain amount of sense to me at that time. After all, Freudian therapy was bringing me closer and closer to a kind of sanity and peace I had never dreamed of having. And there was no more confirmed atheist-materialist than Sigmund Freud. He had replaced the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the Id, Ego, and Superego, three functions of the mind. He had replaced the fall of man with a story about a primal patricide in earliest times—that was how he explained our universal sense of guilt. He had essentially rewritten the story of Christianity into a new myth of the death and resurrection of our own flesh. For him, all our highest thoughts could be reinterpreted as expressions of our often thwarted and rechanneled erotic impulses.

  If atheist Freud was leading me to sanity, and if the phrase No God was leading me to zen enlightenment, then it seemed integrity demanded I give up my agnostic uncertainty and declare myself an atheist.

  So I tried it. I did. I put aside all thoughts of an outer spirit or of a living love beyond my own consciousness. I skewed my reading to favor atheist writing. Shaw, Kafka, Nietzsche, Freud and more Freud, and then more. The problem was, the atheist reasoning of these writers never held together for me. I wanted even my daydreams to make sense, remember, and these writers did not. Even Freud, whom I loved so much, used flimsy logic often based on nothing more than his own opinions and a few isolated exchanges with his patients. Why was a made-up primal murder more convincing than Original Sin? Why were pleasure and pain the last words in human motivation? So much of human history proved there was more to us than that. It was simply that materialist prejudice at work again. It was not convincing on the merits.

  Then, in my atheist reading, I came upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It marked a watershed in my thinking. Nowadays, “the divine Marquis” is sometimes depicted as a naughty rogue who enjoyed what the British call “a bit of the slap and tickle,” a libertine who brought a needed dose of sexual freedom into a pinched and hypocritical era. That’s not how I saw him at all. Sade—from whom we get the word sadism—was a violent psychopath who brutally tortured servants and prostitutes for his own pleasure. (When even the French imprison you for your sexual practices, you know you’ve crossed the line!) He was also a philosopher of genius.

  Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Unlike Freud and other atheists, though, Sade followed mad Hamlet’s logic with unswerving honesty. Without morality, he said, we are only responsible to our natures, and nature demands only that we pleasure ourselves in any way we like, the strong at the expense of the weak. “Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves . . . prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense,” he declared. And then, with wonderful wit, he added: “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.”2 All of this, he illustrated with graphic passages of pornography depicting tortures, rapes, and murders in a way intended to be sexually arousing. And his work is arousing. It’s also repulsive. And to my eyes, it’s evil.

  Here, at last, however, was an atheist whose outlook made complete logical sense to me from beginning to end. If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.

  But the opposite is also true. That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil—though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.

  So we have to choose. Either there is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God is real.

  Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread—and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom—that some actions are morally better than others—is the only truly nonlogical leap of faith I ever made. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.

  After reading Sade, I abandoned atheism and returned to agnosticism. I couldn’t quite bring myself to follow my own logic to its conclusions. That is, I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept the existence of God. But I knew the road to hell when I saw it and I chose to go home by another way.

  This left me trying to reconcile my zen revelation—No God—with the experience I had had in the delivery room of a living love outside myself. I began to wonder if perhaps the God my zen consciousness was rejecting was not the real God, but an internal one, the voices and opinions and illusions inside my head.

  Because postmodernism is right in this at least: there is plenty we take for morality and truth that is mere prejudice. There is much we accept as wisdom that is only cultural habit. There is a great deal we mistake for reality that is simply a trick of the light. It is not a bad thing to clear the mind of the false god of our inner voices. That, I came to think, was the idea behind my satori.

  In any case, during the months that followed my experience on Fifth Avenue, zen slowly lost its appeal for me. Sitting still and thinking of nothing, which had once sharpened my sense of life, now began to feel like an experience too much like death, a waste of precious moments that could be spent in action and vitality and self-awareness. Prolonged mental silence seemed a rehearsal for the grave. What’s more, like postmodernism, zazen enforced its own conclusions. Meditate on nothing long enough, and you soon achieve inner nothingness. I assume if you meditated on turtles, it would be turtles all the way down.

  And in fact, with an empty mind, a mind quieted through meditation, I had not found the world a Buddhistic illusion in the least. I had seen that world more clearly, that’s all. That clarity—that was the fourth epiphany.

  There was just one more to come.

  By now, my therapy was nearing its conclusion. My anger, depression, and hypochondria were all things of the past. I was working well and effectively. I was publishing successfully. I was thriving economically. My home life was a joy. It had only been a few years since that moment when
I sat in darkness contemplating suicide but both my interior and exterior lives were utterly transformed. I was ready to bring the therapeutic process to an end.

  I faced this moment with both eagerness and regret. I had come to love my psychiatrist—my first and only mentor—as I had never loved any man. I’d been broken and he had healed me. It was clear we had developed a relationship beyond the normal therapeutic one. Under other circumstances we would surely have been friends. I knew I could come and visit him whenever I wanted. But it was going to be a sorrow to me to stop seeing him on a regular basis. Still, I was certain this was the right thing to do. It’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining. I needed to be free of ceaseless self-scrutiny in order to live.

  I entered a kind of mourning period then. After that first therapeutic breakthrough when I had wept on the stairs, it had seemed to me the possibilities for renewal and personal transformation were infinite. But, of course, in the end you discover you are still yourself, no matter what. Some traits are in your nature, born with you. Some scars are written in your flesh indelibly, the signature of history. And some brokenness is simply inherent in the human condition. I was grieving over my limitations and the unchangeable past, mourning the ideal childhood I hadn’t had, and the ideal parents my parents couldn’t be.

  I remember one day I was passing the building that had housed the radio station where my father worked most of my life. The station was gone now and the building was being remodeled. I went inside. I rode the elevator up to the floor where the radio station had been. The place had been gutted: walls removed, wires dangling from the ceiling, carpeting torn up. But smell is the sense of memory, and the place smelled the same, a unique smell radio stations had back then, a product, I suppose, of hermetic soundproofing and recirculated air. I drew in that smell and walked through the ruins. I could make out hallways and corners where I had once run and played as a child. I found the newsroom where the gruff reporters had stopped working long enough to kid around with a little boy. I stood in the space where my father’s studio had been, where my father had stood at his microphone creating his amazing array of comical characters with their infinite variety of voices. I thought: It should have been so much fun. We had everything. A roof over our heads and food to eat, an intact family, a father working at a job he enjoyed for good money; a fortunate life. Our house should have been filled with gratitude and charity and rejoicing.