by Jaimal Yogis
Dedication
For Pa
1946–2016
Epigraph
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I’d like to see you living in better conditions.
—Hafiz
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
A Brief Note on God
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jaimal Yogis
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Brief Note on God
God is in this book. And this, I suppose, shouldn’t come as a surprise. God is, they say, in all things. But the G-word is loaded (in more ways than including everything throughout time and space). Allow me to briefly explain.
My last book, The Fear Project, was about the neuroscience of fear and courage, as well as my own attempt to get over the fear of surfing thirty-foot waves at a break called Mavericks. Having been beaten up by those waves, I cannot highly recommend that project. But before that, I wrote Saltwater Buddha, a coming-of-age memoir about running away from home to surf then nearly becoming a Zen monk. Scientists and Zen Buddhists rarely say “God.” If they pray to a supreme being, intelligence, or force, they do so silently or while coughing. But I don’t think Zen and science are antithetical to God. I have long prayed to the big man or woman. And this book is, at least in its second half, an attempt to explain why.
Before going further, I will note that I was raised by Buddhist-yogi parents who’d largely abandoned their native Judaism (Mom) and Catholicism (Dad) but always hung on to a respect for both. Mom and Pa named me after their ’70s Yoga guru, Baba Jaimal Singh—Mom thankfully convincing Pa to drop the “Baba.” Our Lithuanian last name, Yogis, seems to be coincidence. But since Lithuanian is the closest European language to Sanskrit—and Mom practically needs an ambulance if she eats a chili flake—we’ve often joked that our ancestors were yogis who fled India to escape spicy food.
In any case, if the name Jaimal is making you picture me as a black man—or the Buddhist-yogi history is conjuring images of my family as shiny, happy, furry people raising goats in Mendocino—stop. Goats would have been lovely. And I can grow a decent afro thanks to the Jewish roots. But, much to the chagrin of my hip-hop-obsessed twelve-year-old self, I’m white. Also, my dad was an air force colonel. My mom ran a day care out of our suburban house before becoming a college counselor. We drove a Lincoln station wagon that broke down as often as it ran.
But goats in Mendocino or not, yoga and meditation have always been part of the Yogis family. And even though Buddhists like to frame themselves as sort of intellectually above a creator—since I’m married to a Catholic and have lived with both Yogic and Buddhist masters of different sects—this strikes me largely as good marketing on the part of Buddhists to distinguish themselves from rival yogis. It has also been good marketing for yogis to include the Buddha in their pantheon of saints. Ancient India was a competitive place.
Beyond the salesmanship of religion, however, there’s no getting around the fact that the Buddha was a yogi. And as a religion major who has spent far too much time debating such things, I know that if you really press Buddhists on it, most will admit that the difference between their notion of “true nature” or “Buddha nature” (infinite, present in all things) and the “God” that Saint Francis, Gandhi, Hafiz, Rumi, or Thomas Merton spoke of (infinite, present in all things) is likely more of a tomayto-tomahto issue than a theological debate.
That’s not to say there aren’t huge differences between faiths, philosophies, paths. Or that there aren’t some people who think of God as a big Santa Claus in the sky putting people on the naughty list. Everyone is entitled to their view. But we are not concerned with those views in these pages. We are concerned with the whole enchilada, the Big G, the nondual, the substratum of all things, the primal beingness that gives rise to (and is) science and poetry, faith and skepticism, supernovas and subatomic particles, Red Sox and Yankees.
In Yoga philosophy, as with all the great faiths, God could never be captured in words. But if you tried, you might say God is an intelligence akin to the Force in Star Wars or what Voltaire seems to have been getting at when he wrote that “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
I know there are as many Yogic philosophies as there are scientific theories. Samkhya, Vedanta, Tantra. There is probably now a Yoga philosophy they sell exclusively online for just $99.99 with a limited edition organic recycled yoga mat. Humans love to brand and argue. But the truth of our original nature must be singular. And yogis would note that meditation, religion, service, science, philosophy, and those funny pretzel poses are all paths to God. But none of these paths or methods encapsulates God. And none is better than the others. The paths are simply fingers pointing at the moon, rafts across the ocean of suffering, different strokes for different folks. Or to use my favorite metaphor, the paths—like all things subject to birth and death—are waves.
God is the sea.
Introduction
Patch the wind in the pines
To your hempen robes;
Use the moon as a pillow,
The ocean waves as your sheet.
—Shido Munan
Behind the mist, up north, Mount Tamalpais is opaque. To the south, save a single-file swirl of pelicans, nothing but water and white. Westward, I climb the dunes through drizzle, squinting out on a blackish Pacific.
Having slept on the floor again last night—my hand wedged between crib bars to link fingers with Eben—I stand on these ice-planted dunes in the same clothes I wore yesterday. Brown corduroys caked with splotches of neon-green puff paint. Wrinkled plaid shirt with crusty peanut butter on the cuff. Moccasins. I yawn, scratch my curls, surveying the conditions.
Barely dawn but April has arrived with its usual bluster. Ornery onshore gusts picking up force. Winter’s brawn dwindling to flits and splats.
Not that the sea isn’t always sublime in its way. I can’t often look at it without hearing echoes of Issa:
Mother I never knew
Every time I see the ocean
Every time
But when you peer out from the same dunes each morning, you begin to notice Mom has mood swings. Today she looks to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed.
I sip my coffee, groggy. I don’t want to paddle out. After a weekend of two predawn trips to the emergency room—first for Amy who thought she was miscarrying our third boy, then for Eben (boy two) with a 103-degree fever—I don’t want to do much. But exercise is parent medicine. I know this. So I meander back across the Great Highway to our little blue house with white trim—the house that’s too small for five, the house we narrowly afford—through the garage that looks like a Tetris experiment, tug on the dank five-millimeter wetsuit, grab the nine-foot hull, and trudge back to Ocean Beach, San Francisco.
Wading through the shallows, I’m not thinking about surf. I’m thinking about Amy (thankfully, she wasn’t miscarrying but is still miserably nauseous). I’m thinking about work (students need their short stories back). I’m thinking about Mom’s hip surgery, Pa’s lung cancer traveling to the brain.
Worries congeal. Clumps of dead jellies onsh
ore. But as I lie down to paddle, the first burst of icy brine hits skin. The second. The third. A harbor seal pokes its cheeky head up. Sea foam crackles the ears. Suddenly, out of necessity, I can’t think about any of it. Now I’m paddling toward the rip that will carry me through. Now I’m slipping under the “timeless waves,” as Seamus Heaney called them. Now the horizon goes and goes.
Beyond the breakers, the chop is absurd. The waves are awful, at least in terms of this wave-sliding game Hawaiians dubbed a sport of kings. But the longboard—foam canoe that it is—will pick up any hint of push. So I turn, paddle, and drop down the muddled face.
A quick burst. Ten yards if I’m lucky. I’m nearly pitched. But success or failure is not the point here; and as I paddle back, this odd ritual—grown man chasing fleeting bursts of salt water purely for fun—starts, again, to work. Senses move from fuzzy to high-definition. Brain and lungs and heart begin to tingle. And with each silly surge, I am lighter: a boy chasing fireflies instead of a father chasing to-dos.
“Did sea define the land or land the sea?” asks Heaney in the same poem I quoted previously. Water, scientists say, gave life as we know it. But then, didn’t water need earth to catch it in its gravitational tractor beam?
Geologists and astronomers used to think so. They guessed that water first greeted dry earth hundreds of millions of years after the planet’s formation. But recent studies of meteorites said to be old as the sun show large amounts of water actually inside them, suggesting, as geologist Horst Marschall told National Geographic, that “Earth’s water most likely accreted at the same time as the rock. The planet formed as a wet planet with water on the surface.”
“The Supreme Good is like Water,” wrote Lao Tzu more than twenty-five hundred years ago, “which nourishes all things without trying to.” Buddhists offer bowls of water as symbols of the enlightened mind. Conversion to Judaism requires tevilah—full immersion into “a body of living waters.” Wudu is the ritual bathing Muslims perform before praying. And for Christians in the Middle Ages, holy water was so powerful that churches locked up their fonts so the blessed liquid wasn’t stolen by sorcerers.
But whether you follow a spiritual path, a scientific one, neither, or both, water has been here. And we’ve been well pickled. Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist, writes that “human fetuses still have ‘gill-slit’ structures in their early stages of development.” And “in its mineral composition, the water in our cells is comparable to that found in the sea.”
To boot, the amniotic fluid we bathe in and breathe for nine months is 99 percent genetically identical to seawater. We have too much subcutaneous fat to solely be landlubbers. We also have the ability, like cetaceans, to slow our heart rate while diving to profound depths (some 831 feet without oxygen by the latest free diving record).
Nichols’s book, Blue Mind, is a riff on why our brains, themselves 80 percent water, show increased happiness and feelings of unity while submerged. So maybe it’s just my aqua brain returning home for supper. Or maybe it’s the way the fog is wrapping everything in its fat wet quilt. But as the sea buoys my liquid cells, this character I perceive as fixed—writer, surfer, husband, dad—begins to bend. Maybe dissolve.
I don’t vanish like some video game ninja. I feel my borders. Bones and blood and teeth all wrapped by this weathered cloak—“skin bag,” as the Zen poets called our rubbery exterior. But it’s as if I’m ferried to a memory before amoebas struggled, birth by birth and death by death, toward life’s most recent neat trick: self-consciousness.
Words have a hard time with the experience. But back in our living room, toddlers attached to shivering legs while I brew another pot, I flick at whatever just happened with memorized stanzas.
And all the while my heart shall be
With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea.
Psychologists say blending into our surroundings is a feature of having thin boundaries versus thick ones. In decades of studies, thick-boundaried people see themselves as part of firm groups (“we do this; they do that”). They see the world as separated into good and evil. They don’t recall dreams well or feel unified with the diversity of the world.
Thin-boundaried people remember many, often wild, dreams. The borders between self and other fall away from time to time. It’s easier for them to feel empathy, but the thin-boundaried sometimes struggle to stay focused.
I’m on the thin side. As a ten-year-old, I dreamt of living in an African tribe and bawled upon waking, complaining to Mom that the suburbs were less real than tribal life. Her response was that I still had to vacuum the house before I went skateboarding in fake suburbia. I’m not sure if boundaries explain why, at times, I’ve felt as though everyone and everything out there is actually in here and vice versa. But I know that I’m far from alone.
“One moon shines in the water everywhere,” wrote Ch’an (Chinese Zen) master Yung Chia (said to have died peacefully while meditating in 713). “All the reflected moons are just that one.”
Rumi, the great Sufi poet, put it like this: “We are not a drop in the ocean. We are the ocean in a drop.”
This book is, in essence, an attempt to understand the ocean in a drop, to find that one moon shining in the water everywhere. An attempt to find God, enlightenment—or whatever your preferred word is for the principle that unites us. It’s a continuation of my first stumbling-toward-enlightenment book, Saltwater Buddha, in which I started off as a starry-eyed sixteen-year-old on probation for theft and drunk driving, and then ran away to Hawaii with little more than a copy of Siddhartha, a boom box, and enough cash for a used surfboard.
This one picks up shortly before Saltwater ended. And I meant it to carry on through the years until now. Books have a life of their own, however, and the characters from life in my twenties soon enveloped it.
Readers of Saltwater Buddha will recognize some of the terrain—New York, especially—but these pages, even when they overlap in time, are different, especially because I have widened the frame. All memoirs build a container that’s something of a lie. (You can never say it all.) But this book gets a little closer to the truth in that surfing and Zen are just big characters among many. The first third of this book takes place as far from ocean as you can get, the Himalayas. There is also a good long section set in a Franciscan friary in Washington Heights; another, in the dusty streets of Jerusalem.
If you came for surfing, you can easily skip to Mexico and Indonesia. But if you can venture onto land for a few chapters, the sea can be found on those snowcapped peaks too. Whatever path you take, though, the great religion scholar Mircea Eliade wrote, “In water, everything is ‘dissolved.’” And I’m hoping that this salty-sweet brine we’re soaking in blends these tales into something beyond mere letters representing words representing ideas representing experience. There is a place beyond all that which also gave birth to all that, a place that gathers us in for a really good party. I hope to meet you there.
1
You can fall a long way in sunlight.
You can fall a long way in the rain.
The ones who didn’t take the old white horse
Took the morning train.
—Robert Hass
It was 3:00 a.m. and spring when I arrived in McLeod Ganj, a sixteen-hour bus ride from Delhi.
Delhi had been 115 degrees. Before arriving there, I’d spent a week in Gujarat, the birthplace of Gandhi, reporting on Hindu-Muslim violence and getting diarrhea. So looking at this quaint Himalayan village glowing with the golden lights of Tibetan monasteries—patches of late-March snow reflecting moonlight—I felt like I’d found refuge. Or, at the very least, a cool rest stop.
At about six thousand feet, the valley was lush but protected by white peaks so immense they looked like staircases to the stars. One mountain, the 18,500-foot Hanuman Ka Tibba, towered on the horizon as grand as the mischievous monkey god it was named after. And though I’d been exhausted from the breakneck ride, I was suddenly so excited to be here I decided to wand
er until the sun came up.
After Tibet’s failed uprising against China in 1959, India allowed the fleeing fourteenth Dalai Lama to make McLeod headquarters for the Tibetan government in exile. Thousands of Tibetan refugees followed, spackling the hillsides with monasteries, hermitages, and centers for Buddhist study.
Of course, the Dalai Lama’s presence has also made the village an international pilgrimage site, bringing the inevitable kitsch. Next to a gallery of traditional Tibetan paintings, I found a tourist shop that sold T-shirts with slogans like “My karma ran over my dogma” and “Reincarnation is making a comeback.”
When I arrived in India a few months ago, this shop might have pissed me off. Like every other twenty-three-year-old who flees east, I wanted authentic India—not the one packaged for Westerners having a midlife crisis. But by this point, I’d also come to grips with the fact that globalized India was authentic India.
In Bangalore, for example, the city I’d first traveled to for a journalism course, I was having a hard time finding a yoga class that wasn’t taught by an American in Lululemon tights. Frustrated, I asked a local couple in matching Lacoste shirts where all the Indian yoga teachers were. “Oh, foreign teachers are all the rage,” the woman said in a thick South Indian accent. “With those swamiji types it’s tough to get a good workout.”
Thinking this was an urban issue, I then traveled to a remote ashram to see a guru with a reputation for orthodoxy. But after a four-hour bus ride, I was informed that the guru had passed away. His replacement, though Indian, was a retired NASA scientist who led our yoga retreat in PowerPoint.
I’d been in India for about three months now and still occasionally caught myself in eddies of nostalgia for the old country. But I got through those moments by reminding myself that the point of finding that India would be to learn what the ancient yogis taught: life is flux; embrace impermanence. So, instead of resenting the ugly T-shirt store, I took a breath and considered coming back to buy one for my military-officer dad. It said, “You can’t handle the meaning of life!”