by Jaimal Yogis
“Dis good religion, good teacher, show all people how find good inside. Dis bad religion say people many many different. Then people many many fight.”
I smiled. I had more questions, but part of what made Sonam such a relief to be with was his simplicity. So we moved on to a more pressing topic: how to make Sonam’s dipping sauce. We chopped chili peppers and garlic, adding them to vinegar, soy sauce, and honey. But once the dumplings were cooked, Sonam couldn’t help pointing out that the circle dumplings and square dumplings tasted “bery same same.”
Sonam then tasted my ugly gnocchi piles.
“Ja-ma,” he said. “I tink your momo better next life.”
Then, of course, he cracked up.
As I thought back on Sonam, I got a lump in my throat. He seemed to be sitting right in the auditorium, telling me, “Listen dis Professor Thurman. Dis mind many many beautiful.”
I listened. That said, I’ve never been much of a note taker, and Thurman speaks very quickly. So hoping not to misquote him, I’ve dug up some of his writings that are close to what he taught us.* If you imagine Thurman saying this with a few jokes and cackles thrown in, all the while swigging an iced tea, you’ll get the point.
“Finally,” Thurman said, “there is the extremely subtle body-mind. . . . This is the indestructible drop, called ‘the energy-mind indivisible of clear light transparency.’ Very hard to describe or understand, and not to be misconstrued as a rigid, fixed identity, this subtlest, most essential state of an individual . . . is a being’s deepest state of pure soul where the being is intelligent light, alive and singular, continuous yet changing, aware of its infinite interconnection with everything. It is beyond all instinct patterns of lust, aggression, or delusion, and makes the boundless process of reincarnation possible.”
Thurman said this indestructible drop resided in the heart center. And as I watched Thurman pace, it seemed he was speaking from this place of light aliveness. I felt light and alive too. It was as if Thurman was personally reaching into my chest like that old Tibetan in my dream years before and pulling out this fluid soul. “Behold!”
And yet, at the very same time, the skeptical journalist in me was scribbling down questions. Fortunately, I didn’t have to be the class sacrifice.
A man who looked to be in his late fifties and fit the intellectual look well—bow tie, thick round glasses—said that his teacher, a psychologist, taught that Buddha spoke of reincarnation mostly to please Hindus who believed in “that sort of thing.” He said the Buddha was actually more of a scientist, that maybe the texts had even been altered after Buddha’s death to incorporate Hindu deities and reincarnation.
Thurman grinned. He blew into his hands as if he was stepping up to home plate. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “hmm, hmmm,” and began pacing even faster.
Thurman acknowledged that Buddhist texts had indeed changed and evolved. He also massaged the man’s ego by adding that this was a good question. These are questions that also came up during the Buddha’s life, he said. Even twenty-five hundred years ago there were materialists who believed hard matter was the basis for all consciousness and absolutists who believed only the void—oneness or God—was real, which negated the importance of the individual. But both of these views are extremes the Buddha wanted to break people from.
“The Buddha was never dogmatic about formulae,” Thurman said. “He emphasized selflessness when talking with absolutists and he emphasized self when talking with nihilists. But the Buddha always taught a soul as what reincarnates, as a selfless continuum of relative, changing, causally engaged awareness.”
“But,” the man interrupted. “Buddhism purports to be a tradition that embraces logic and science, and there is no evidence for such thinking!”
Thurman smiled and rubbed his hands again, then asked the man if he’d ever seen a black hole.
“No,” the man replied.
“But you believe they exist?” Thurman asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because scientists have proven so much that we can observe so I trust that they have also discovered some things that are unseen.”
“Precisely!” Thurman said, and he explained how the great yogis ask the same. Students on the path to enlightenment should not take anything on faith. When they meet a teacher, they should investigate her logic. They should see if some of the basic, observable teachings are true. Do the teachings on self and mindfulness and ethics relieve suffering directly? Are the other students of the teacher practical and sane? Then, once some trust has been built, a student can begin to trust some of the things that the teacher says about the unseen just as we now trust scientists about what they say about the unseen—which, let’s not forget, is every bit as wild and mysterious as anything the Tibetans are saying about birth and death.
“Many credible witnesses report that they died and experienced certain adventures,” Thurman reminded the class. “Some died clinically and were revived. Some remember as children details and circumstances of former lives, and some of their memories are corroborated by other people, standing up to the investigation of reputable researchers. Some codify the data collected in various ways and present it in manuals in traditions of dying used in many cultures. And the majority of humans in most civilizations feel they must have some concern for the state of their awareness in the future lives they will be obliged to face.”
You could hear a pin drop in the room as Thurman rambled on, so many of us no doubt wondering if we believed it. But then, Thurman asked a question that has stuck with me to this day. We think of rational science as liberated and flexible and religion as rigid, but “who is clinging to dogma?” Thurman asked. “What is it that provides materialists the guarantee of a restful nothing awaiting them after death?”
The class was silent.
“No one,” Thurman said, “has ever returned to report entry into nothingness. They have no recorder, no viewer, no extension of their senses into the subjectivity of a dead person. They cannot physically probe into the brain-dead state of any being. They have no convincing description of nothingness, which obviously has no attributes. They have never observed even one material thing become nothing. Why should the energy reality of a state of awareness, be it even a minimal awareness of pure rest, be the exception to the law of physics that energy is conserved and only transformed? What makes the materialists believe so powerfully in the nothingness of that one energy continuum?
“The answer is, obviously, that they have no grounds at all for this belief. It is merely a belief based on brave assertion, corroborated by many other believers, all without a shred of evidence, reinforced by constant repetition and dogmatic insistence. It provides ultimate comfort, satisfying the religious urge to have a complete sense of reality. This comforting nothingness might give rise to suspicion or doubt, so it is disguised for the materialist by the pretense that nothingness is something frightening, something undesirable, a bitter pill that he or she, the brave modern human grown-up, has learned to swallow. This is why materialist scientists are so dogmatically dismissive of evidence about the postdeath continuity of consciousness. They cannot consider the evidence even casually, because this would generate questions about their own belief. Like any religious dogmatism, since it is a logically weak belief, often admittedly irrational, based on no credible evidence, it cannot allow even the slightest questioning, for fear that the resulting doubt could not be withstood.”
And then, as if this were just afternoon tea, Thurman looked at his watch. “Ah, look. We’ve gone over. Have a nice weekend.” And he stormed out of the auditorium.
13
I loved Thurman’s class. It shook me up in just the way I needed shaking. After that one class, I started doing my daily zazen again. Surfing still involved a two-hour train ride and had to be very occasional, but I at least took a few more laps in the pool. I felt better.
As for the life-after-death ideas, I was tempted to say, as I usually did, “Ye
ah, maybe.”
There are lots of types of intelligence. And I’m not sure this means much, but my maternal grandfather, Larry Klar, had a genius IQ. He was even named best mathematician for his class at West Point. Gramp was also a happy man, a dear friend to all his grandchildren, and pushed us constantly to think for ourselves. Gramp said that he was staying agnostic about the soul and God until science could prove it. At one point Gramp even said he might try cryogenics so he could be revived in the future and see if scientists had made any progress on the big questions.
Gramp never did that. He died peacefully in his sleep two weeks after smashing me in a game of tennis. (Also, he did become rather spiritual in his final years.) But I’d decided to take Gramp’s approach of rational agnosticism too, which jibed with the Buddha’s suggestion to accept nothing blindly but to test out spiritual teachings like a scientist to see if they really did work to relieve suffering. At some point, if you meditate deeply, it’s said you will recall past lives naturally. I wasn’t there. So agnosticism allowed me to entertain all possibilities without taking anything on faith.
This had worked OK. But maybe because I hadn’t been all that great of a spiritual scientist, it also made me feel weak at times—swayed by whatever the dominant view of a culture was. In India, I leaned toward Sonam and his multiple-lives view. At the Ch’an monastery, I could see how perspective changed based on the mind—that belief was relative to other assumptions of culture and geography—and that in any case the body returned to the grass and the sea and the air.
But outside these sanctuaries, surrounded by a culture that seemed clear the afterlife was an opiate of the people, I’d found myself leaning toward that materialist view. This view assumed that consciousness arises from the brain. And when the brain dies, so does consciousness. Anything beyond that was magical thinking.
After Thurman’s class, however, it struck me that my agnosticism might be what was also making life in my twenties so unstable. Since turning eighteen, I’d wanted to be a lifeguard one day, a war reporter the next, a scientist one day, a monk the next, a harlot one day, married the next. Part of this was just indecision. But also, if I really looked, these desires fluctuated depending on whether I was running the “screw it, you only live once” view or the “mind and soul are infinite” view.
I was rarely consciously thinking of either of these. We live in a society that worships youth and shoves death under the rug. I wasn’t so different. But these two paradigms—one life versus infinity—still swung back and forth in my unconscious, occasionally popping through in dreams and producing different results in life. “You only live once”—YOLO, as the Internet generation puts it—seemed to produce a mix of desperation and existential freedom, a feeling of wanting to get as much pleasure as you could out of this fleeting existence because a long nothing waited without any other consequences or benefits. This was a view that had contributed to some heedless fun but also to stupidity like getting drunk and leaving with my ex’s friend that night. The “mind and soul are infinite” view made you want to find internal joy and wisdom so that wisdom would inform where your soul flowed at the crucial transition. Like Pascal’s famous wager, this latter view also made you want to pay more attention to that little thing called karma.
Obviously, it wasn’t easy to prove either of these views was true with a data set.*
But maybe if I could get a little closer to settling the pendulum swings between these perspectives, I could get closer to stability—have the right board for surfing the stormiest seas.
I thought about Thurman’s suggestion that I should look at how my own experiences match up with the yogic teachings, then see if it made sense to trust what yogis were saying about the unseen. So, one spring day after another of Thurman’s classes, I skipped a journalism lecture and went to sit under a willow tree in Central Park, the one near the blacktop where the disco roller skaters twirled with their boom boxes and headbands.
Michael Jackson and Prince in the background, my thoughts drifted back to a meditation retreat that had changed my perspective on what is real and unreal more than any other. I’d just finished the yoga-teacher training with Baba Hari Dass and had decided to stay on at his ashram in the mountains above Watsonville (this was a couple years before I met Sonam). Babaji was seventy-seven years old at the time and looked the guru part. He had a long silver beard like Gandalf the wizard. Eyes that could slice you like Ginsu knives—eyes he wielded often because Babaji had taken a vow of silence. For fifty-two years, he had only written to communicate and taught students via chalkboard.
At any rate, toward the end of my semester at the ashram, Babaji was answering questions about the levels of samadhi—those superstates of concentration and bliss that, in both Buddhism and Yoga, are tiered experiences of this nondual awareness. As students asked increasingly frustrated questions about why they’d never gotten to this state, Babaji started giving answers a bit like a football coach tries to fire up the squad (“Anyone can do it with hard work!”). One woman, a new mother, asked him how she could ever find time to dedicate to such meditation in her busy schedule.
Babaji smiled, writing: “You seem to still have time for movies.”
The woman looked down.
“Yep. Got it,” she said.
I was twenty-one, zealous, and loved this response, loved Babaji’s go-hard attitude. And after that lecture I was charged up to go and get samadhi as if it were a mountain I could conquer with enough training. I started meditating three or four hours per day, putting off schoolwork. Then, during break, I took a twenty-dollar Greyhound bus ride to a silent retreat at my old Buddhist monastery, the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, one of the few places I knew where meditation retreats were still free (no small thing when you’re a college student). Sitting beneath a golden statue of Guan Yin, I practiced a secret yoga Babaji had given me when I’d officially taken him on as a teacher. This yoga, Babaji had told me, was meant to be practiced for about two hours per day, and it involved visualizing energy moving through the body’s central energy channel, which the ancient texts say runs parallel to the spinal cord and through the chakras. It’s also the path the subtle mind energy is said to exit at the time of death.
I knew that I probably should follow directions. But thinking of Babaji’s motivational speech, I got a bit carried away. I did the practice all day long. And most of the night.
This felt mischievous because I was breaking Babaji’s instructions. But I justified it by thinking, Weren’t all the great sages great rebels? They all followed the system. Then at some point they bucked it. And crash or succeed, I was going to find my own way, dammit!
I don’t think I expected this to actually work, at least not in any tangible way. But about five days into my otherwise ordinary retreat, my spine felt as though it had gone from the usual bony thing that held me up to a Texan superhighway with little vehicles of breath or energy running up and down. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but it came with a rumbling from the base of my spine to the tip of my head that felt a lot like sex. I tried not to attach to the pleasure, but I couldn’t help liking this a heck of a lot more than having achy knees and praying for the bell to ring so we could go to lunch.
Now, even though I was putting a lot of work into this yoga and meditation stuff, I was never really sure any of this talk of centers in the subtle yogic body, chakras—which mean “wheels” in Sanskrit—was, you know, real real. I’d thought I might have sensed them in some rare moments. But I also thought there was a chance that this chakra talk was actually just a way ancient people imagined emotions manifesting in our bodies—a gut feeling, a broken heart, and so forth.
That uncertainty was gone a second later when whatever was happening in my spine caused a tingle in my sternum. The tingle soon became a swirl, the swirl a slow rotation of warmth, and soon, for lack of a better way of describing it, my heart—and not the organ but a distinct wheel-like feature right at my center—felt as though it were getting
spun by a contestant on The Price Is Right. Faster and faster the heart wheel spun, until the spinning consumed my head and limbs. A flash of heat rushed up me, pinged the crown of my head, and quite suddenly, I felt both like I was having an orgasm in every one of my cells and like I was gone. I was just heat, just electricity, just vibration.
I have no idea how long that moment lasted. But when I came out of the state, it was as if I’d done fifteen hours of stretching in the sauna. Usually the meditation schedule at the City was excruciating—hour after hour of still-sitting for fourteen hours. But after that moment, each subsequent hour began whizzing by as if time itself had warped. Not a hint of pain.
Usually if I did a yoga pose, I felt as though I was trying to cram my body into the cookie cutter it was never meant to be in. When I popped into any pose after this heart spin—cobra, triangle, downward dog—I could feel more of what the pose was doing inside—directing heat through internal subway tunnels and roundhouse wheels with elaborate branches and petals. Each new passageway in the body seemed to have its own bliss, its own intelligence, and there was a part of me that thought, Yes, this will last forever. I’ve made it.
Unfortunately not.
By day seven, the bliss was fading. I tried hard to hold on, staying up after midnight in the Buddha Hall. But white-knuckling the state backfired. On every retreat I’ve ever gone on, I have felt pretty good at the end (at least better than I started anyway). But by the end of this one, the sauna bliss had just left me feeling really, really weird. I also had a throbbing headache.
And for weeks afterward, I felt off, even a little nuts. Magnetic forces seemed to push at me from left and right. I worried that I’d become one of the classic cases the yogis warn about, a student who doesn’t follow instructions and goes insane.
Embarrassed that I hadn’t followed Babaji’s advice, I didn’t even ask him what I should do. Instead, I consulted one of the lay teachers from the Ch’an monastery, Steven Tainer. Steven was more experienced with issues of internal energy than anyone I’d ever met, and he just nodded. “You just did it too much,” he said as a parent might to a young child. “Some of these practices are sort of like getting in a rocket ship. You might get to outer space faster. But you also might explode. A steady practice, a compassionate practice, is more important than a high one. You can have high meditation and still be a jerk.”