Dirty Work

by Bull, Rod;

  At the back of my mind, I felt that Wendy would get better, but this was not happening. Soon it became apparent that she would die. One morning she told me, “When I die, dress me in my white cotton dress with my mala in my right hand and crystals in my left.” This blew my mind, and I tried to hold back my tears. Her strength and courage amazed me.

  Soon after this, we decided she would get better care in a hospital and that someone would stay with her all the time. Her Pueblo Indian friend, Adrienne, sang beautiful Pueblo songs to her. Her good friend Connie, Joel, Arabella, and I all took turns, eventually being allowed to stay in her room. Wendy fell into a coma. Every now and again she would come to, saying she was sorry, that she had been in a car accident and hurt her knee. It was as if she was going back through her life. Early one morning her breathing grew weak. She came out of her coma and started to sing the mantra om mani padme hum. We all started to sing, and she died singing this mantra of the Buddha of Compassion. There was something very uplifting about this, and sad, at the same time.

  Gurdjieff’s words came to mind: “The only thing that will wake up humanity is the realization of one’s own death.”

  The past months had been taxing for me, but it had been much worse for my son, Joel. I don’t think he has ever recovered. Arabella seemed to handle it much better. During the next few years it was a scramble to keep a steady work routine while looking after my daughter. My son went to stay with his cousins. Not being used to a routine, or to continuous work, this was a big challenge for me. Somehow I knuckled down.

  I wanted to do things with my kids, and one of the things they both did was ski. I spent a lot of time driving them to ski areas, then time at the bar having too much to drink, then trying to drive home. This was not a good combination.

  This didn’t really happen, once they realized I was a slow learner. Stupidly, I didn’t take any lessons, thinking I wasn’t good enough, and struggled along on my own. Turning was the problem. Turning left was possible, but unless I was going to ski in circles, I had to find a way to turn right. One of the more drastic ways I found was to grab onto a post at the bottom of the hill and swing around it. Of course, this did not always work, especially if I was going too fast or was on another slope, nowhere near the post. I had to find another way. Crashing, falling down, spinning around, skiing in circles were all on the cards. One day a worker at the area told me they were taking the post away before I killed myself. Brilliant! Now what? This was the turning point in my skiing. Suddenly I found I could turn right! Slowly, I progressed to steeper slopes.

  One day a friend told me about a friend of his, Jeannie, who was an amazing skier. “Maybe she could help you.” Lessons—what a concept! I owe a lot to Jeannie, for her patience and skill at finding ways to get me to do things. One of the things we worked on was sensing the body, what were our feet, ankles, hands doing? Where was the tension? One of the blokes I was reading mentioned that skiing was a very good form of meditation. This got my attention. I started doing breathing exercises on the lift, sensing the body, using chants to get a rhythm and pressure sense going, closing my eyes to feel the snow. Since I was very stiff, this helped me to relax. Combining Jeannie’s brilliant suggestions with sporadic outbursts (“Would you please pole down the hill!”), this really helped my skiing.

  Another idea was to learn wind surfing. This, I thought, would be a great thing to do in the summer with the kids. It proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought. Again, I proved to be a slow learner, but being stubborn, I battled on and eventually managed to get the board back to my starting point. More often, it was a long walk back.

  There were some scary moments, going out in strong winds, having the mast break, trying to paddle back, then being towed. Once I got blown out to sea, but luckily it was low tide, which uncovered a causeway to a lighthouse, so I could walk and drag my board back. This made me acutely aware of how quickly things change: how the senses are heightened, and the whole body becomes alert. There is a real feeling of being alive—the mind clears. It is empty but alert. Thoughts come and go, but they seem insignificant. There is a feeling of just being there, in the moment. The stronger the wind, the more awareness there is. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

  This made me wonder what I was doing when I tried to meditate. Was I trying to stop thoughts, desires and feelings that awareness was somehow blocking? There was something unnatural about being on the edge, letting things happen naturally, without attachment to them—without the clinging. This was puzzling for a long time, until I heard about the Tibetan teachings on Mahamudra and Dzogchen, where discursive thoughts, feelings, and desires are used to bring about realization.

  These teachings help you enter the natural state of mind, naked awareness, Rigpa, or whatever you want to call it. In this state, thoughts, feelings, and desires can arise and dissolve without an attachment to them. In fact, in some cases they are encouraged. This made a lot of sense to me, not disregarding any part of life. One of the problems with observation is that the very act changes what you are looking at. So how to look, or not to look: let the appearances come and go, in the aware-ness. The puzzle is how to enter the state of naked awareness, Rigpa.

  A strange thing happened at an Empowerment being given by Tai-Situ Rinpoche. In these Empowerments, the Rinpoche touches the top of your head with some kind of sacred artifact. When Tai-Situ did this, something opened up. My meditation became more natural. This again seemed amazing to me. How could it happen? When I asked him about it, he said, “You were in the right place. The timing was right.”

  Looking back, I had lost a lot of money against my better instincts, loaning it to my brother, thinking that my doubts came from my tight-assed attitude towards money. Anyway, the result was that I felt very vulnerable, a little empty. Maybe this was what he meant. Since that time I have been studying Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings, particularly Chogyal Namkhai Norbu’s teachings on integrating the natural state in life situations. These teachings talk about already being enlightened: the natural state only needs to be uncovered, like clouds obscuring the sun. I think everybody really knows this, but habits good and bad keep us from being in this state.

  Every now and again we get reminders of this natural state, from lack of sleep, lack of food, a sudden shock, drugs. Once I did a 10-day fast at a health place, having to clean up my liver from drinking too much. I was amazed after the 10 days how much energy I had—I could go for long bike rides—and also how much better I felt. All that, from just hot water, lemon slices and honey three times a day. Another time, after snorting some horse, I was going up, going up, going out of my body, leaving all the tensions behind, up through the clouds into a brilliant blue sky, sun, magic peace. Somehow I always felt this space was there all the time, only needing to be uncovered.

  How to uncover it without drugs? That was the question. Luckily for me, I did not have the money to buy a lot of heroin. I did, however, have a 6-ounce bottle of amyl nitrate that I got by default, from making fuel for my son’s model diesel engine. It was used in the fuel to cut down the engine’s need for oxygen at high revs. Mostly I used it to get over hangovers or at parties.

  One of these parties was being given in honor of my partners and me for finishing a very difficult building project. We had been drinking champagne and brandy mixed, getting pretty pissed. My partner John shouted out, “Get the amyl, Rod!” So off we went, taking a few sniffs and sobering right up. Our hosts were amazed. They wanted to try some. They took the bottle, both took sniffs, hanging onto their chairs as if they were being catapulted into space. “What is this stuff? I resent it, I’m out of control, let me try again.”

  It was breaking down their barriers, and ended with John chasing the man’s wife around the house and jumping into the pool with her. Things were a little over the top. I’m not sure what they learnt from this, if anything, but they really loosened up.

  I was talking to a friend of mine who had opened a Tendai center nearby. He f
elt that a lot of people from the ‘60s had come to meditation and Buddhism through drugs. Paul and his wife, Tamami, pretty much single-handedly started this center of Japanese Buddhism. No easy task, attracting people from different beliefs, making it very open and accessible to a lot of people. He now has twenty to thirty people who come every Wednesday and also has a priest’s training program. Moreover he has other centers in the U.S. and Europe. This is amazing, as he did it all with his own money in just a few years.

  I have noticed that, all in all, there is something for everybody. Different types of people are attracted to different types of teaching, or horses for courses.

  Floundering in the Dark

  Waking with a jolt, wondering where I was, I suddenly remembered I was doing a dark retreat—after the lady left, I had laid down and fallen asleep. The strange thing was that the room seemed to be alight; maybe light was getting in through cracks around doors? I investigated the light source, finding no cracks. The light appeared to be more of a glow, not coming from anywhere in particular. I tried shutting my eyes. Strange, the glow was still there! How could total darkness have light? This was very odd.

  I had no idea of time or day. I thought of trying to feel my way round, as the glow did not make things visible. Fumbling around, I found the bathroom, and managed to piss on my foot. Trying to wash was a trip. The soap kept slipping from my hand; the whole process seemed to take hours. It was time to lie down again. Where was the bed? More fumbling, groping. After what seemed like hours of feeling along walls and doors, I finally tripped over the mattress on the floor, landing on the mattress on my back. That’s it, just stay put! Trying to focus on the practices I had learned for the retreat, my mind went blank, so I just watched my mind, thoughts arising from nowhere, going back to nowhere.

  Slowly dozing off, but somehow awake at the same time, dreams started. The double I had seen under hypnosis appeared. This time it was fully formed, and spoke very clearly, saying that I had caused an epidemic. One of the mayflies that had bitten me on that island had escaped from the germ warfare lab I had seen from the beach; it had got to the top of my windsurfer mast, flying out when I reached the shore at Old Lyme. The mayfly had been injected with a virus that can cause many ailments to animals and humans alike, including death if it gets to the brain. The fly had then died, being eaten by a mouse, which became infected with the virus. As the mouse became infected it picked up ticks, which also became infected, carrying the disease to other animals.

  Mainly, the effect was to keep the infected party at a low level of infection. The virus did not want the infected carrier to die; instead, it kept the carrier at a low level of energy. Was this the way the virus creators wanted to keep people, so as to control them, creating zombies?

  Slowly coming to, I started to realize that I was experiencing a lack of energy, having just enough to work, then home to sleep. I was making just enough money to stay in poverty. This was definitely a way of keeping people docile. It was all starting to be a bit over the top. Was this some kind of government conspiracy? All the tests had turned up negative, so what was wrong with me?

  I decided to get up and grope around to see if there was any food left over and eventually found the kitchen. Feeling along the countertop, I found nothing there. Was I in the right room? Where was the food? Groping, feeling, stumbling, stubbing my toe, reaching down and feeling the floor, I felt something like a plate of food. What was it? It felt like spaghetti. I picked it up with my fingers and put it in my mouth. Trying to chew, somehow it did not seem like spaghetti. I kept chewing and nothing happened, just a leathery taste. Could this be? Suddenly it dawned on me … bootlaces! Brilliant! The hunt for food was becoming a load of old bollocks. Apart from leaving a bad taste in my mouth, I could die from food poisoning. Time to lie down.

  The sojourn back to the bed was hazardous, bumping into walls, stubbing my toes, slipping on something. Ah, the plate of food I was looking for! This time it was on the bottom of my foot. Eventually, I found the bed, flopping down exhausted from doing nothing. Dropping off, coming to, and dropping off again: somewhere in all this, dreams and visions of the Karmapa kept appearing.

  At first, it seemed it was the 16th Karmapa, and then he dissolved into the 17th Karmapa. He was talking to Tai Situ Rinpoche. They were talking about something I had asked the 16th Karmapa about my karma, and what was causing events to go wrong for me. They were discussing the fact that in a past life I had inadvertently caused a chain reaction of events. It had started by me accidentally killing an old possum. This possum would eat diseased bees and bugs, thus preventing them from spreading disease to trees, shrubs and grasses that had been keeping hillsides stable by preventing mudslides. The disease caused large tracts of dead forest and grasslands, forcing the animals and insects of these areas into populated areas, causing the people in these areas to catch diseases that their immune systems had no defenses against. By killing this old possum, the diseased insects were not kept in check, causing many problems! What had made things worse at this time was the fact that I had accidentally brought the mayfly from Plum Island. This would now cause problems in other lifetimes.

  They continued to discuss my situation, saying that because I had not caused any of these events intentionally, there was a chance I could neutralize the effects of these karmic imprints. The best way for me to do this was to use the practices of Mahamudra to enter the state of Naked Awareness. They were also saying that I should try to contact an American Indi-an medicine man named Wallace Black Elk, for he would be able to tell of a medicine to cure my illness, as well as that of others.

  At this point, I woke up thinking I should write everything down as soon as possible so as to not forget anything. Everything was pitch black, and not having any writing implements with me, I began to panic. What to do? Groping around, I felt something that seemed like a towel. Out of the blue, I started to tie knots in it, hoping that this would somehow help me to remember the dreams.

  I had no idea of time, whether it was day or night, or how many days had passed. Food! Maybe the caretaker had left food while I had been asleep? What was different? Voices . . . were there other people doing retreats in other rooms? The voices stopped, the glow was gone, leaving black on black.

  Suddenly, with no warning, a flash of light, roaring flames pouring from its eyes, a demon appeared. It roared at me, saying I had upset the balance in his domain. The shock of seeing this creature brought me into a strange state. I knew this demon was part of me. The fear became flashes of past and future events. Thinking this demon was going to kill me, I heard myself saying, “Whatever it is you are going to do, do it.”

  The roaring and flashing stopped. Slowly the vision dissolved, leaving just the echo of the words, Right the Balance! A sudden urgency overcame me. I felt around for my clothes, finding my workout pants. I could not get them on!

  What was the problem? I heard voices and knocking. “How are you doing?”

  The caretaker had returned. “Time’s up. I’m coming in,” she said.

  Slowly I could make out a figure carrying a dull light. It must have been night, as no daylight came in.

  “How are you doing?” she was saying as she shone the dull light in my direction. The light was dull so as to not hurt my eyes.

  “Ok, could you shine that light over here? Something is wrong with my pants. I cannot get them on.”

  Looking down, the light revealed my problem. Knots. I had tied knots in them thinking they were my towel. I untied the knots, put on the pants, then found my shirt. The lady was telling me I had done three days, maybe it was time to leave. It had seemed like a month.

  Thanking her for her help, I went straight to my car to write down what I remembered of my dreams.

  Jackdaws

  Meeting my brother again after many years, drinking into the early hours, the conversation turned to what we had found in the shot-down German planes.

  “What was it you saw in the cockpit?” I asked. “Death.�
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  My brother was staring into space.

  “It was horrible, this figure burnt black all over, with just the whites of his eyes showing, the smell of burnt flesh. Suddenly I saw my own death; this completely flipped me out, and I could not do it anymore. Somehow seeing death face-to-face, the flesh burnt down to the bones, made everything seem unreal, empty.”

  The beers kept coming, bringing back more past memories.

  “What were you and Charlie Corner into with the jackdaws?” I asked. “How did you know about that?” he asked.

  “I was hiding in the bushes when you and he parachuted the baby birds down from that mansion,” I said.

  “Charlie trained these baby birds to steal. This was not too difficult as they were attracted to anything shiny, particularly jewelry, taking it back to a nest Charlie had built in the woods behind his house. Mum figured it out when she saw a jackdaw flying through her own bedroom window, taking a ring in its beak from the dresser, flying off with it. She watched it fly to the nest. She told the police, and they were able to get to the nest, finding a lot of missing jewelry. Charlie was away at this time. Usually he would look in the nest every day, taking out whatever was there. The police were unable to pin anything on Charlie, although many people thought he was involved.” “Great, I was trying to model my life on what you and Charlie did, trying to build a person. I didn’t realize he was a thief.”

  Something started to dawn on me. Many of the experiences I had tried to process had stayed with me. What was I trying to build, fabricate? Like the jackdaw attracted to shiny things? Cracks in the armour kept opening up, flashes that somehow I did not really exist! It was a strange feeling, the rug being pulled from under me. I needed to find someone to help me with this.