by Mark Sundeen
“I stayed another night. Stayed awake. I felt really good. In the middle of the night I was doing walking meditation when Tanach showed up. That was the first time anyone ever came to the cubicle. He came in. As I was walking and meditating, he said, ‘It’s like time doesn’t matter anymore. When you’re walking you can’t tell if it’s been an hour or five minutes.’”
Were Joseph Campbell narrating Suelo’s story, he might say that the hero had reconciled with God. He had found the eternal present—and unlike the hell of his poison-berry vision a decade before, this time it was heaven. “The hero has died as a modern man,” writes Campbell, “but as eternal man—perfected, unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn.”
Suelo knew that he had been through a life-changing experience, but wasn’t sure what to call it. “I never had any intention of becoming part of any religion, or calling myself anything,” he says. “I just wanted to explore the depths of Buddhism. To take the truth out of every religion. Run with it.”
Paradoxically, what he found at its depths was Christianity. “So I thought: ‘I have to embrace what in it is true, and throw out what is not, instead of throwing it all out.’ The only reason I wouldn’t is because I’m worried about what people think, and part of that is I don’t want to be associated with the hypocrites. It’s that way for a lot of people. Is it possible to embrace the truths we’ve been given, accept what’s good in our roots, and not become hypocritical, like this fear that I would become a crazy fundamentalist?”
Suelo’s first inclination after leaving the monastery was to go to India and become a sadhu. After Michael Friedman arrived in April, the two men flew to Calcutta and crossed the nation by third-class train, visiting the temples of the Buddha, Ramakrishna, and Mother Teresa. Daniel met some sadhus, who live today much as they have for centuries. They own nothing, dwell in caves or forests or temples, and survive on the alms of others. These men are naked or wrapped in just a loincloth, with long beards and dreadlocks. They often cover their bodies with ash and paint their faces brightly. To demonstrate their lack of attachment to their physical bodies, they might perform acts of physical suffering like lying on a bed of spikes or holding their hands overhead for days at a time.
Suelo quickly learned that not even holy men were free of the tentacles of money. Many of those calling themselves sadhus were frauds, bilking visitors for cash to show them fake relics or perform bogus ceremonies. Suelo’s reaction was like that of Gandhi, who reported after a visit to the shrines: “I came to observe more of the pilgrims’ absentmindedness, hypocrisy, and slovenliness, than of their piety. The swarm of sadhus, who had descended there, seemed to have been born but to enjoy the good things of life.” Suelo even met a European sadhu, and spent a few days with him. But upon discovering that the man kept a Swiss bank account, into which he’d occasionally dip when he wanted a respite from poverty, Suelo was disillusioned. The Indian temples seemed not so much like sacred spaces as a racket overrun with charlatans. Suelo scolded guides and cabdrivers as they delivered him to a cousin’s teahouse to spend money. When an innkeeper promised not to sell Suelo anything and then took him to a silk shop, Suelo exploded.
“I don’t want to buy anything,” he sputtered, sweating from a fever and the summer heat. “I have very little money, and I’m tired of getting scammed. Everywhere I go in India someone is trying to scam me. And this is Varanasi, supposed to be the holy city of God, and all I’ve seen is corruption and greed, and children working in sweatshops, and I don’t want to support that.”
Suelo demanded the man take him back to the hotel, and started packing up his stuff, while the innkeeper begged him to stay. Suelo flayed the man with lines from the Bhagavad Gita: “The Scriptures say to renounce the fruits of your actions, to not expect things in return, to give freely!”
Remorse clouded the innkeeper’s face. He wept. “Please stay,” he cried. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
But Suelo was delirious and stubborn. “I have to keep my word. I told you that if you tried to sell me something I was leaving the hotel, and I’m keeping my word. Keep your word to people from now on if you want to make amends.” And with that, the hero stomped off on shaky legs into the squalor, looking for a new hotel.
Fleeing the June heat and the scams, he parted ways with Friedman and rode a bus to the Himalayas, to an outpost of Tibetan Buddhists. He rented a room from a Hindu family in “a slate-shingled mud house with no running water on a slope of a mountain, in a group of houses called Dharamkot, above a town called Bagsu, above the larger town of McLeod Ganj, way above the even larger town of Dharamsala.” He loved the cool rainy mountains. “All around my place are terraced, cultivated fields stepping down the steep slopes,” he wrote. “And there are monkeys everywhere! (You’ve probably figured out by now that I love monkeys.)”
He continued studying Buddhism for a month while volunteering to tutor a monk in English. “Tibetans are incredibly peaceful, happy, down-to-earth people—more so than any other people I’ve encountered,” he wrote. “You go to the temples and monasteries and find so much joviality, but not to the exclusion of intense sincerity. There’s so little or no self-righteousness & pretension & pompousness that is so common in every other religion I’ve witnessed.”
The monk gave him a book about Milarepa, the twelfth-century Tibetan saint. It was heady stuff, not for the novice: “First, concerning the conquest of non-human beings: the Master gave the Demon King Binayaka at the Red Rock of Chonglung the teaching on the Six Ways of Being Aware of One’s Lama.” Yet Suelo was captivated. When Milarepa took to the caves, he made this vow:
So long as I have not attained the state of spiritual illumination,
I will not descend to enjoy alms, or offerings dedicated to the dead, even if I die of hunger in this mountain solitude.
I will not descend for clothing even if I die of cold.
I will not indulge in worldly pleasures and distractions, even if I die of sadness.
I will not descend to seek medicine, even if I die of sickness.
Without allowing myself to be distracted in body, speech, and mind, I will work to become Buddha.
What’s more, here was a holy man who dwelled in not one cave but twenty! Suelo hiked into the mountains to camp in these legendary alcoves, each with its own name: Horse Tooth White Rock and Shadow of the Pleiades, Ragma Cave of Enlightenment and Banner of the Sky, Sensory Pleasure of Betse and Lonely Cuckoo. Such mystery and poetic power—a cave was not just some dank hole in the rock, it was the Lotus of the Grotto!
Although disappointed by the sadhus, Suelo was still wondering if he should remain in the East. Upon returning to Dharamsala, he learned that the Dalai Lama was in town, and went to hear him.
“All you Westerners,” said the Dalai Lama. “It’s admirable that you come all this way to learn Tibetan Buddhism. But the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Every culture and every religion teaches truth. And we always think the other culture’s is better than our own. It’s good for some of you to learn Tibetan Buddhism and become monks, but it’s not for everyone. Most of you are looking for something other than where you’re at. I’d recommend that most of you go back to your own cultures, learn your own wisdom, your own traditions.”
Suelo knew this was right. He’d come all this way, crossed oceans and deserts and climbed mountains to sit at the feet of the Lama himself, only to learn that what he needed was to go home. That was the purpose of his time in the monastery—to rediscover the faith of his youth. He had been cut off from his roots, and now he needed to return. “The irony is that my aim in exploring other faiths has been to learn more about Christianity,” he wrote at the time, “not to become a Buddhist or Hindu or whatever.” There was a pressing emotional need to return, too: if he quit money in India, he would never see his family again. That was too sorrowful a prospect to bear. Finally, Suelo just wasn’t interested in leading the cloistered life of a monk. As much as he admired the Tibe
tans, he quibbled with their theology, complaining about “the common tendency of Buddhists and Christians to see the world as an evil to escape from.”
Suelo wanted to engage the physical world, even with all its trials and corruption. “I wanted to be a sadhu,” Suelo says. “But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A real test of faith would be to go back to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping countries on earth and be a sadhu there.”
. . .
AND SO BEGAN the final phase of our hero’s journey: Return. “His second solemn task and deed therefore is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed,” writes Campbell. “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast.”
Indeed, having decided against the heavenly rock dwelling in the Himalaya, Suelo would find his faith tested by his return to the world’s banality. At the time, he didn’t see himself as heroic anyway, nor did his life resemble a meaningful journey. He was just confused. He spent another entire year mired in indecision. Once again broke, he camped on Damian Nash’s couch for the winter and resumed working part-time at his same old job. He helped his Alaska friend Leslie Howes move to Seattle, and heard her reports of being teargassed at the WTO demonstration. He applied for a permanent full-time job at the women’s shelter but didn’t get it.
And then Suelo suffered what would be the final indignity of his life with money. He still owned a car, a dented Honda hatchback on whose white flanks he’d painted a flock of black ravens. On a trip to Boulder to visit Tim Frederick, the old car gave up the ghost. Suelo nursed it into a Honda dealership for a diagnosis. The mechanic reported that it needed a new timing belt, a repair that at six hundred dollars cost more than the car was worth. Suelo declined, sure he could find a cheaper mechanic. Maybe his brother could do it for free. Whatever, said the mechanic. But Suelo still owed seventy-five dollars for the diagnosis.
“That’s unethical,” Suelo argued. “You didn’t tell me you were going to charge me just to look at it.”
“That’s our policy,” said the mechanic.
Tim Frederick offered his credit card, happy to help his friend out of this dilemma.
“Put your wallet away,” Suelo said. He was fighting this one on principle, the same reason he checked out of that Varanasi hotel. The stalemate continued, with Suelo getting more agitated. Another mechanic stepped forward with a solution. He would take the wreck off Suelo’s hands for a hundred dollars. But accepting money seemed like prostitution, an act complicit in the dealership’s unethical behavior. Daniel didn’t want their money. He wanted them to be honest.
“You can just have the car,” he said finally, storming out of the office. It would be the last time he owned a motor vehicle.
Two weeks later, he was back on the road, hitchhiking across the country, visiting friends, living on the cheap. The only way for him to live ethically in this corrupt world, he felt—the only way to access that eternal present that he’d found in the monastery—was to abandon money. Suelo wanted neither to owe nor to be owed. In the words of Christianity, he wanted the Lord to forgive him his debts, and he forgave his debtors. In the words of the Bhagavad Gita, he wanted to release himself from the fruits of his labor. To give freely without expectation of receiving. Only then could he break free of the Western concept of linear time. Credit and debt kept us fixated on the past and the future. In the words of the Buddha, Suelo wanted to cut the tangle of attachments, to break the circle of reincarnation and dwell in the eternal present.
But to just stop using money was not easy. He would have to give up not only most material comforts, but also the freedoms he was accustomed to: driving a car required a license that cost money; traveling abroad required a passport that cost money. But that was the point. We’d become so entangled that there appeared to be no way out but total refusal. Giving up money might even turn out to be illegal: what if, for instance, he owed back taxes? What he was proposing was a prolonged act of civil disobedience. Suelo was afraid to go it alone.
He learned about a communal farm in Oregon. Members grew crops and shared meals, no money required. Maybe such a place would be right for him. Suelo fired off a couple of emails inquiring if he could come, but received no reply. So he shouldered his pack and thumbed to Eugene, arriving at a ramshackle old house on a sprawling farm.
“I sent an email,” he said. “I’m here.”
Nobody remembered any email. If he wanted to stick around, they said, sure, go ahead, get to work. They required forty hours per week. That seemed fair. But the work wasn’t all digging potatoes and sharing the abundance. A lot of it was busywork—pulling dandelions or sweeping the drive or raking leaves. And the residents weren’t actually growing enough food to subsist on—the daily crop could hardly produce a salad. The farm survived from business ventures—they ran a café in the nearest town, and they contracted with the post office to deliver mail. The commune was beholden to credit and debt.
Worse yet, it just wasn’t fun. The people were dour and gloomy. Everyone worked their forty hours, and if you were caught idling, you were guilted into working more. It seemed the point of all the work wasn’t to produce more crops, but just to keep busy, to avoid being pegged as lazy, a subproductive member. These utopians seemed to have chucked the Protestantism but kept the work ethic.
Suelo thought about the Kung bushmen. They lived in one of the harshest places on earth, yet they only had to work two hours a day. The rest of the time they spent in leisure. Yet here he was, slaving away on this farm, which was situated in one of the most fertile areas of the planet. What was wrong with this picture?
After a few weeks, Suelo packed his bag and left. The tangle of attachments remained tangled. He hitched up to his sister’s house north of Seattle. Now back with her husband, and as firm a fundamentalist as ever, Pennie did not approve of Daniel’s drift from Christianity, but she was willing to engage him in conversation about faith and the search for meaning. He took stock of his life. Suelo was thirty-nine years old, six years older than Christ upon crucifixion, six years older than Martin Luther was when he posted the 95 Theses, the same age as Martin Luther King Jr., at the time of his assassination. And what did he have to show for himself? A few adventures abroad. A few years in a cave. Do-gooder jobs.
He had to make a decision. Down one path was gainful employment, a regular life with a roof overhead, bills, debts, and all the moral compromises that came with it. Down the other path lay the romantic quest that beckoned, hatched in deep wilderness, in deep prayer, at the feet of the Lama. This was the path of the heroes and the prophets. But wasn’t it just a fantasy? Who was he, Daniel Shellabarger, of Grand Junction, Colorado, to single-handedly reject the modern era? It was a path filled with alienation, hardship, ridicule. Maybe he should give up this fandango. Maybe he should just bear down and get a job. The year was 2000, and the economy was booming. The temptation was great. At the moment it was irresistible.
With his fluent Spanish and Peace Corps résumé, he found a job in Seattle as an advocate for Spanish speakers navigating government bureaucracies. On the first morning, commuting in his sister’s car, he sat in traffic for two hours. And then he stepped into chaos. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Strangers jabbered Spanish in his ear. He had to ask them to repeat themselves—his Spanish was a bit rusty. Stacks of paper spread across the desk in his cramped cubicle. Sweat soaked his shirt. His boss took
a look at him and asked if he was sure that this job was what he wanted. He stared back, unable to answer. When six o’clock mercifully arrived, Suelo stumbled out to the street and found a parking ticket slapped on the windshield of his sister’s car. He inched up the freeway, another two hours in gridlock. He looked around at his fellow commuters. Not a single one was smiling. Not a single one looked content.
When he finally walked through the door, his sister asked how the day had gone. Daniel erupted: “This is insanity. I don’t see how people live like this.” He called his new boss, got voice mail, left an apology for wasting her time, regretted that he wouldn’t be back.
Now he was sure that he had to complete his journey. He pored over a directory of intentional communities, hundreds of them the world over. But most compromised, took part, through commerce or barter or membership investment, in this insane system he was determined to escape. That wouldn’t do. He had to go all the way.
He found a place: the Gandhi Farm, a radical vegan organic cashless off-the-grid commune far in the backwoods of Nova Scotia. Its twenty acres nourished a forest of sugar maple and white birch and quaking aspen, an orchard of walnut and cherry and apple. Plots of wild native strawberries and blackberries and Juneberries ripened in summer. Clear water sprang from a well. An eighty-year-old farmhouse could sleep eighteen. Eden. The place was so off the grid, in fact, that it didn’t have a telephone number or email address.
Daniel looked at a map. Nova Scotia was a long way from Seattle. He had a few hundred dollars left. In September 2000, he bought a bus ticket to Bar Harbor, Maine. The ride lasted five days, the Greyhound cramped and stuffy and stinking of sweat and tobacco and vomit. When he arrived, he hitched to Canada and bought passage on a ferry across the Bay of Fundy. He had fifty dollars left. He folded it in half, then in quarters, and slipped it into his back pocket: his emergency insurance against the occurrence of some Bad Thing, whatever it might be.