On and on the circus went. Four or five times in the two hours, I got up and took one loop around the room, watching Rinpoche be perfectly still. By the last half hour my legs were starting to stiffen and ache terribly—the yoga was catching up with me—and I was anxious to be done with this exercise, and I sat there in a more comfortable posture, feet on the floor, eyes closed, the circus going, spinning, whirling.
And then, five minutes or so before Rinpoche tapped me on the knee, I began to settle into a kind of quiet that was very pleasurable. There were thoughts, but they came and went without carrying me away. There seemed to be spaces between the thoughts—that’s the only way I can express it. Thoughts and images floated across the sea of my mind with spaces between them. I could watch them come and let them go. The bird had stopped tapping, gone elsewhere for the night. The refrigerator hummed. I thought about eating, of course, but even those thoughts were small sailboats out on a placid bay, harmless and interesting but not particularly enticing, wending their way across the calm waters of my new mind. Rinpoche tapped on my knee, and when I opened my eyes he was studying me. Then he was smiling. “Good, yes?”
“Yes, partly. I felt—”
He held up a hand. “Now,” he said. “Go to sleep, and just every little while in your sleep if you remember, breathe in once and out once and sleep. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “But can we talk about what happened?”
“Just sleep now instead of eating, instead of talking.”
“All right. Thank you. Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
THIRTY-FIVE
In the morning, I woke to the realization that I could not move. I discovered, in my postyoga agony, that there are hundreds of tiny muscles—back of the neck, armpits, pelvic area, front and back of the legs—that we do not pay the slightest attention to in the course of our normal waking activities. During the ten or fifteen minutes I spent lying there, trying to work up the courage to move, it occurred to me that yoga was all about becoming aware of those muscles, training them, feeling them, and that the misery I was then experiencing must be a kind of payment for four decades of being half-oblivious to my own body. I wondered, too, if this physical situation was a metaphor for my spiritual one: Maybe, surely, there were whole areas of the mental landscape that I had been blissfully unaware of all these years.
When I tried to sit up in the bed the silent crying out of my muscles turned into a full-throated screaming. On top of everything else, I was ravenously hungry. I lay there and concentrated on the hunger, imagined the pleasure of food in my mouth (for some reason that morning I had a particular inclination for a bran muffin, grilled and slathered with butter, a plate of fresh fruit, and hot black coffee), then breathed in and out slowly, once. Again. A third time. I tried to move just my feet and found that I could twist them in circles, very gently. Then I moved my hands the same way. Not too bad. In this fashion, after fifteen minutes, I was able to sit up on the edge of the bed and hold myself there on locked arms so that my stomach and back muscles would not have to do any work. Outside the window I could hear the bird at its fruitless tapping. I breathed in and breathed out. I pushed myself to a standing position and let out an involuntary groan. Getting back and forth to my bathroom for ablutions and medication and getting dressed was another fifteen-minute process, but as the muscles warmed, and as the ibuprofen kicked in, they hurt slightly less. When I stepped out into the main room I found Rinpoche waiting for me, standing at the sink, big smile on his face, glass of water in one hand.
“So we can drink, at least,” was my morning greeting. “I’m glad. I worried I was cheating because I already had a few sips with my ibuprofen.”
He filled a second glass and handed it to me.
“You didn’t tell me you were a yoga master.”
He laughed happily, kindly. “Otto has muscles that hurt today, yes?”
“Otto hurts. His selfhood hurts. The innermost essence of who he is has become pain.”
He kept laughing. “Next time not so bad,” he said, and when we were done drinking he hoisted my suitcase and carried it and his famous oversized purse down the stairs. In the lobby, checking out, I tried to keep my back turned to the breakfast buffet, but I could smell everything—the apples, the toasted bagels, the sugar-dusted raisins in the Raisin Bran in its vacuum-sealed packet in its cardboard box. I could hear the morning news: a number of men had been arrested in Great Britain because they had been planning to blow up airplanes in midair. New restrictions on carry-on luggage were to be put in place. To distract myself from the food smells and bad news, I filled out one of those comment cards, telling the GrandStay management how nice I thought the room was, and soon we were in the car, driving away, filling up with gas, and starting north on Route 53, in the direction of Lake Superior.
Every half hour or so, Rinpoche would tell me to stop, and I would get out of the car by the side of the road, stretch for ten minutes, and drink from a bottle of water, then get back in behind the wheel. It made for a long and very slow trip. Duluth was the next big city on our route, and I had cell phone service, at first, so on one of those stops I called information, selected a massage therapist at random, and made an appointment for the next morning.
All this time I was thinking about eating. In a not very serious way, I wondered if, by not sticking to my body’s usual routine, I might be doing myself harm; if some organ—spleen, maybe—would cease to function because of the lack of caloric intake and be damaged forever. I pictured Jeannie and the kids eating. I pictured myself at work, taking my time with a raisin scone and coffee at the midmorning break, or walking around the corner to the Taj Raj for chicken korma and gulab jamon. Every time we passed an exit I looked at the signs for chain restaurants and thought about all the people there with their burgers, their fries, their slices of factory-cooked cherry pie. Was God angry at those people? Was the creator of the universe sitting in judgment on them for indulging their appetites? It seemed only right and natural to eat and a kind of violence to be refraining. A very logical interior voice kept nagging at me to sneak a bit of chocolate and break Rinpoche’s fast. But I did not.
Somewhere in the middle-north of Wisconsin, where the fertile cornfields had fallen behind us and we were traveling through a stony terrain of weatherbeaten houses and shaggy farms, I said, “I have to say I don’t see the point in this not-eating stuff.”
“No point,” Rinpoche said.
“Then why do it? Is eating evil? Is it sinful? I don’t understand.”
“Not evil.”
“What, then? Tell me.”
“Eating. Sex. Movie. Bohling. Nice things. Not evil. It makes you think about itself, though, yes?”
I thought of the days when Jeannie and I were first married, and the great sense of anticipation I’d always feel as we climbed the stairs to our third-floor Chelsea walkup, arm in arm, knowing we would make love. I thought about it then, and thought about it afterward, and the next morning, and the next afternoon, and the next night walking up the stairs again. “Yes, I suppose so. Of course,” I said.
He nodded. “And this always thinking about the next pleasure, this is not so bad. Except it keeps your mind from how it could be calm in this moment. This can happen on a very subtle level, or not so. If you don’t eat for a little while when you can, or don’t sex for a little while when you can, then you see better the way the mind makes the world for you.”
“And that does what, exactly? Abstaining, I mean.”
“Makes the glass more clear. When your mind is more clear, you see the true way the world is made. When you see the true way the world is made, you feel at peace inside. You see how you make your own world, so then you can make it different if you want.”
“But that’s just another pleasure to anticipate, isn’t it?”
“Yes, very much.”
“You’re Zenning me. I’ve been Zenned.”
He laughed but did not say anything else. By the side o
f the road I saw a barn with IT’S A GIRL! in faded white paint on one side.
“At the end of the meditation there, last night, and at the end of the yoga, there was a short period where my mind seemed to be functioning differently.” I glanced over at the Rinpoche, expecting a smile, a word of praise, or encouragement. He seemed bored. “It was a wonderful feeling, a kind of quiet. Do you know that feeling?”
“Of course. I am in that feeling all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Of course.”
“When you were in prison?”
“When I was in prison I prayed that the people hurting me there would know that pleasure.”
I glanced back and forth between the road and his calm face. A lie? Self-delusion? A sweet rewriting of history? I tried to recapture the mental landscape of the few minutes in the corpse pose, the few minutes on the hotel sofa. “Why is it so pleasurable?”
He pondered this question for a while, looking out at the unspectacular scenery. “Remember the painting on the wall in the restaurant?”
“The print of the eight-hundred-year-old painting with me in it? How could I forget?”
“Remember around the heads of the goddess and the gods was a circle, and in that circle a blue space with nothing inside?”
“Yes.”
“That is the blue space, what you felt.”
“All right. It’s a nice blue space. I liked it. In the picture it reminded me of the halos around Jesus and Mary and the saints in a lot of the Christian paintings I’ve seen.”
“Yes, exactly so. The people who made those paintings of Jesus and Mary could understand this, what I am saying. In that space there is no anger, no killing, no war, no wanting food or sex all the time. And no fear of dying.”
“How do you know?”
“Forget me!” he said, rather roughly. He had turned to face me now, and his voice held that note of pure authority in it and not so much kindness, not so much patience. “Many peoples have written about it. Catholics and Protestants and Sufis and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and Muslims and Baha’is, many great teachers. Not my idea, Otto, not me, just a fact. Is the sky my idea?” He swung an arm up in the direction of the windshield. “If I say, there is the sky, do you ask me how I know? Do you think I’m the crazy man that thinks he invented the sky?”
“Well, I have only a few days, I want to learn as much as I can. . . . And I admit to a certain skepticism that—”
“You should underlearn,” he said.
“Underlearn? You mean unlearn?”
“Unlearn. You learned already too much. Don’t think so much now, just whenever you want to think so much take a nice breath, listen to the tires’ noise on the road, look at the trees, look at the lake, look at the other cars, feel inside when you are breathing, feel the pain in your muscles. That is what yoga does for anyone, makes you to pay attention, not to think. Do not force information into your mind. You are smart now, you will always be smart, but if you think too much it pushes you from God.”
“All right. God here I come. Watch for my halo.”
He didn’t laugh. “Life is very fast, Otto.”
“I know that. I’ve seen that with my children—they were infants in diapers a couple days ago; now they’re ready to leave the house.”
“This is a way to make it slow.”
THIRTY-SIX
At one point, I remember, we turned off Route 53 and wandered around in the sandy territory to the east, taking two-lane highways that ran along a lake and past plain-looking cottages. I thought, maybe, we could pull over and take a swim, or hike down a side road, but, in spite of three doses of anti-inflammatories, my muscles were as sore as if I’d just had my first week of high school football practice. Swimming would hurt. And I suspected that Rinpoche had seen enough trees and cornfields, so a dirt-road hike did not seem the wisest plan either. We passed a small town, then the Fisherman’s Hall of Fame, marked by a hundred-foot-long plastic pike or muskellunge suspended on stilts, but even that didn’t tempt me. I decided not to think about it, to just drive back to the big highway, observe, calm my mind, and let any American fun in the area come to us as a gift of the gods.
I had hoped to stay that night in downtown Duluth—a place I remembered well from half a dozen childhood trips—but a series of phone calls gave me to understand that all the grand old waterfront hotels there were full up, so we had to settle for a motel on Barker’s Island, on the Wisconsin side of the lake. With the stretch breaks, semicircular detour, a stop for gas, and another stop for tea, it was late afternoon by the time we pulled onto Barker’s Island, the air hot but not particularly humid, my stomach clenching and muttering. Steak, I was thinking. A nice rare steak with garlic mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus, maybe just a salad beforehand, a couple of glasses of cabernet. Then cheesecake for dessert.
Our lodging on Barker’s Island was adequate, a sort of resort motel with an indoor pool. Rinpoche and I were given two rooms on the first floor at the far eastern end, just past the pool, which was filled with squealing, happy boys and girls, their parents sitting at nearby tables reading the newspaper or paging through magazines. There was a moldy smell to my room. I opened the window and looked out across the parking lot and lawn, to the edge of a body of water that seemed to be some kind of bay or inlet, not the huge lake itself.
Rinpoche was meditating. We’d agreed to meet up in an hour. I soaked my aching muscles in a hot bath, flicked through the television channels—golf, cooking, news, romance, celebrity fascination—and, for a moment at least, saw them the way I imagined Rinpoche saw them, as just more pleasures to think about, more information to crowd out the blue sphere, more distraction from some essential path. I supposed it was true that certain distractions were better than others. Looking at a great painting or reading a great book might turn your mind in the direction of the pleasurable emptiness; watching babysitters and jilted wives fighting on a TV show probably would not.
Drying off and dressing for dinner, I thought about my parents and wondered if they had, in fact, been living out a kind of meditative existence there on the vast plains west of Bismarck. When my mother swept snow off the boards of the front porch, with a bank of storm clouds speeding east and leaving a bare blue sky above her, when my dad spent all day in his tractor riding back and forth along the endless rows of soybean fields, could they have been sensing something like what I had sensed in my two brief glimpses on the yoga mat and on the GrandStay couch? Some sweet, charged emptiness they knew intimately but could not find words for? Was that why they urged me and Cecelia so persistently toward the farming life? It seemed possible but unlikely. It seemed to me that their spiritual urges were confined, by habit and a kind of Protestant peer pressure, to the plain church where we worshipped on Sunday mornings. Their contract with God was a simple and straightforward one: Don’t do anything evil during the week, go to church on Sunday, God will take care of the rest. Yoga classes optional.
It seemed to me that Rinpoche was making the opposite point: that I was in control of my spiritual situation, not God; that we had been given the tools for an expanded consciousness and it was up to us to use them, not simply wait around for death and salvation. I thought about this in my moldy motel room—just what Rinpoche had advised me not to do. Thought and considered and pondered and held the idea up to the light so I could examine it from several angles. I couldn’t stop myself from approaching the question this way because, after all, thinking and learning had been my path out of the unadorned monotony of Stark County, North Dakota. Once I turned eleven or so, my father had started taking me with him to his regular Saturday lunches at Jack’s, in town. He and three or four other farmer friends would sit over their fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coffee, and pie, and their conversations would be about beans, wheat, soil, insects, weather, feed, the hundredweight price of Angus heifers at Stockman’s auction that week. Those conversations had frustrated me in a way I could not explain: My mind was already l
ooping out into the wider world. Late at night I’d twist the dial on my transistor radio and find stations from Calgary, Montreal, Seattle, Saskatoon, Boise, St. Louis. The people on those radio shows were talking politics, art, the state of the world. They were really thinking. Meanwhile, my father and his pals were stuck in their overalls and hard-skinned hands, trapped in a way of life that seemed to me like a beautiful library with one book in it. I did not want to read that book over and over again forever. Rinpoche was telling me not to think, but it was my thinking, my thirst for learning, that had led me to break the mold of my parents’ expectations and go off to college in Grand Forks, then to graduate school in Chicago, then pack a suit and some city clothes and, with Jeannie, head east for New York City, capital of the thinking world.
Now, Rinpoche seemed to be encouraging me to go home, back to a calmer, slower world, and it was not an easy trip.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The odd pair of us—I in my sportcoat and chinos and Rinpoche in his robe—walked through the motel parking lot and down the access road a few hundred yards to a restaurant I’d seen on the way in. The Boathouse, it was called. The warmth of the day had dissipated somewhat. We could feel, but not see, the cold mass of Superior off our right shoulders, north of the inlet. As we approached the Boathouse we saw an old freighter tied up there, some kind of museum, it appeared, and in its shadow, a miniature golf course with throngs of moms and dads and kids and young adults on dates out in the cooling lake air, hitting their putts and marking their scorecards and shouting in delight.
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