by David Rakoff
Of course, there are a few people among us who have come solely to see a movie star, like the twenty-one-year-old who is still talking about his Sean Connery–themed bar mitzvah (“He’s my role model ’cause he’s so cool”) and the older man who knows nothing about Buddhism and whose questions are generally along the lines of “Anyone ever tell you you looked like a cross between Robert Taylor and Ray Milland?” and “How many meals do you eat a day?”
(Later on I will see this man talking with two women outside the seminar hall, telling them a joke: “Two psychiatrists pass each other on the street. One says, ‘Hello,’ and the other says, ‘I wonder what you mean by that?’ ” He goes on to explain the joke—because aren’t jokes always better when they’re explained?—“See, therapists can’t take anything at face value,” he says, making little lobster claws with his hands. “They’ve always got to—”
One of the women cuts him off. “You’re on shaky ground here, ’cause my husband was a psychiatrist. I don’t need to listen to this.” She gets up and walks away.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry ’cause you’re not.”
Unable to resist, he says to her retreating form, “I wonder what you mean by that!”)
As for the serious followers of Tibetan Buddhism, they see Seagal as their Man in Havana, someone whose visibility in Hollywood is beneficial for publicizing the dharma. Seagal is one of their own, and they are admiring, but not cowed. Fans, clearly, but more than that: fellow travelers.
At the time of the retreat, Seagal had already been on a two-year hiatus from Hollywood due to a growing conflict he feels between his roles as star and Holy Man. “The studios know what they want. Fighting. As I became a lama, I had to establish a line I could not cross,” he tells us. (He’s apparently made peace with that line since then, crossing it to make a film with the very Buddha-like title Exit Wounds.)
The Tibet thing is fairly new in Seagal’s repertoire of identities. All I had known or read about him prior to this weekend had located him in a different, albeit now less fashionable, part of Asia, namely Japan. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and in countless articles about him, Seagal has spoken exhaustively, if not a tad mysteriously, about the many decades he spent over there. Even in the crypto-autobiographical introductory sequence to his first film, Above the Law, his character is seen teaching an aikido class in Japanese and speaking fluently. So this recent and precariously trendy embrace of Tibet comes as something of a surprise. According to the Omega catalog, Seagal, a.k.a. Terton Rinpoche, has been formally recognized as a tulku (incarnate lama from a past life) by H. H. Penor Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. There is perplexity within the American intelligentsia devoted to the Tibetan cause as to how Seagal earned the title so effortlessly. “I haven’t looked into this, but I’m curious as to under what conditions or terms he was accorded this status,” says Ganden Thurman, director of special projects at Tibet House in New York. “I’m afraid it troubles me,” Thurman adds. “I always wondered at the action heroes he played. He always seems to be the only one who tortures his enemies.”
For his part, Seagal frames his involvement with Tibet in much the same way he has described his past possible involvements with things like the CIA and sundry international cloak-and-dagger operations: semishrouded, covert, and intrinsically unreliable. “I was in a monastery in Kyoto and met some monks from Tibet who had been tortured by the Chinese. As I was the only one who had studied herbology, bone manipulation, and acupuncture, I treated them, and there was an immediate connection.”
It’s a familiar trajectory. One day you’re a simple bone manipulator, the next you’re teaching torture victims how to get centered. You almost can’t swing a reincarnated cat without hitting someone who’s followed just this path. The audience, completely unbothered by the essential unverifiability of Seagal’s explanation, nods with appreciative understanding; some people close their eyes and smile, credulously savoring the moment like a divine chocolate.
“Mealtimes are signaled by three blows on a conch shell,” says the Omega welcome booklet. It’s a fairly impressive display of lung capacity, and the people lying here and there about the hill outside the dining hall applaud. Can I really be the only one for whom blowing a conch shell resonates with associations to Lord of the Flies and the grisly, horrible death of Piggy? But blithe decontextualization seems to be the name of the game here (Inner Voyage cruise, anyone?).
Just as at freshman orientation in college, where the first person you eat lunch with ends up being the person with whom you take all your meals for the rest of the week, whether you like it or not, I am forcibly bonded with Meg, a woman in her late thirties from Massachusetts. She is the first person to speak to me at breakfast on Saturday. I ask her what she thinks of Seagal.
“He’s interesting,” she says.
“Yes. Counterintuitively so,” I reply.
“What’s that?”
“It’s counter to my intuition. I’m surprised. He’s quite smart and funny. It’s not what I was expecting.”
She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek with a smile. “That’s not intuition. That’s judgment.” She is very pleased with herself. This is what passes for a New Age zinger.
Despite his CIA-Buddhist puffery, the biggest surprise about Steven Seagal is that he is not an idiot—far from it. More often than not, he is, in fact, smart, funny, and eminently entertaining. He is far and away the very best thing about the weekend, and he displays near saintly patience and equanimity in answering three days’ worth of frequently whacked-out questions with respect and great good humor.
But he is also chemically, tragically late. As our pedagogical leader, his duties are light, having only to lead us in a morning session from nine to twelve and an afternoon class from two-thirty to five-thirty. Seagal tends to arrive at least an hour into each and stays for only an hour. As the seminar continues, the attrition rate mounts. People switch to other workshops, others simply leave. Those who remain are led through a twice daily stretching routine led by Larry Reynosa, Seagal’s main aikido disciple. There is a desperation to these calisthenics. We know that Rinpoche is not in the building, and Reynosa knows we know. The routines are lengthened and repeated. What begins on Saturday morning as a fifteen-minute break between the exercises and Seagal’s arrival stretches by Sunday afternoon into three-quarters of an hour. I become quite limber.
When Seagal does lecture, it is usually at the primer level. (“It is the law of cause and effect—also known as karma.”) As the weekend continues, he shows that he clearly knows his stuff and is capable of elevating the discourse. (“We look at all phenomena as the miraculous activity of the unfolding of the divine. The only thing that’s common is what one makes common by one’s impure perception.”) Basic or sophisticated, however, what’s clear is that Seagal doesn’t have a whole lot of lecture in him; after thirty or forty minutes the sessions quickly devolve into Q&A. And, as anyone who has ever been to a film festival, stockholder’s meeting, or lecture can tell you, when a room is outfitted with microphones for “Q&A,” you will hear precious little of anything resembling an actual “Q.” So when the young man at the mike kicks off our weekend with, “I guess I’ll share something with the group. I recently took out a personal ad that read ‘Pagan Universalist Unitarian Buddhist seeks . . .’ ” I know this retreat will be no different.
It’s both fitting and sadly telling that the weekend’s discourse begins with someone talking about a personal ad. Unlike college, where a microphone was always an excuse for someone to either exhort the crowd to meet afterward to discuss alternatives to the arms race, decry American imperialism in El Salvador—or, in the case of Columbia University in the early 1980s, for a tiny Trotskyite named Shirley to get up and spin out a jeremiad in support of “Soviet aggression in any form!”—the questions on this weekend devoted to compassion don’t get bogged down with a lot of heavy thinking about others. Only one woman asks S
eagal what she should do in the face of hate speech. She hears so much of it, primarily against blacks and gays.
“Well, I’m black and gay, and I’m proud of it,” says Seagal. The straight, white audience laughs appreciatively and applauds. Racism eradicated, we move on. I find her at dinner that night and tell her how much I admired her question. She thanks me and tells me that she has switched seminars and gone over to the “Freeing the Fire Within” retreat.
Questions of compassion are now left up to the likes of the woman who says, “We had some lamas visiting down in Charleston, and they led us in a meditation where we took on all the pain in the universe. And I had to stop, because there’s so much pain in the universe.” To look at her, she seems no worse for wear for shouldering all the suffering of the cosmos. I forget to thank her. Later she will ask, “If we are all one and God is in us, does that mean we are God?” She poses it quizzically, as if she had a question about schedule B on her taxes.
But her questions speak to a larger truth about the Omega crowd. There is great concern for the universe here, with the skein of fate and predestination that enmeshes everything, and this concern affects even the most quotidian decisions and incidents: Meg bought a Lumina because “the Spirit told me to. And also the name. Lumina? Luminous?” (“Wait a sec! Lumina does sound just like Luminous! My God, do the executives at Chevy know about this?”) Behind me in the lunch line, a young woman tells her friends, “So I started to think, Am I gonna hear another song about angels tonight? And I turned on the radio and that song ‘On the Wings of Love’ came on. And you know the first verse is all about an angel, and I was like, I definitely did not plan this. This is so random. And then I thought, Maybe it’s not so random.”
Another time, a statuesque Susannah York type, a participant in the “Healing the Light Body” shamanic workshop, rolls her eyes back into her head rapturously during our morning meal. “You know, yesterday I prayed for organic yogurt, and here it is. It’s a manifestation!” she says, her voice breathy and awestruck at the mysterious ways of the Breakfast Deity.
But if things are habitually attributed to higher causes, I am hard-pressed to see them redound to higher purposes. I hear a lot of talk about the good karma accrued by being good to oneself, but actual hands-on altruism gets almost no play the entire weekend. When I wonder aloud how, at a weekend devoted to the notion of bodhicitta (awakened compassion), it seems curious that there is no newspaper for us to monitor the suffering of the world at large, Meg tells me, “It’s karma.” Meaning, I suppose, that those pesky ethnic Albanians—who that very weekend were being slaughtered—were getting what they deserved. “Besides,” she continues, “you should take a break from all that.” I counter that the casualties of the globe’s misfortunes, the purported objects of our compassion, like the Kosovars, don’t have the luxury of taking a break. Meg immediately holds up her hands in a frightened Stop gesture. “I was told I just gotta say things, so I’ll say that this gives me agita? When things get heavy, I can’t eat? Can we talk about something else?”
Meg’s reaction turns out not to be all that aberrant. The word I most overhear, flying from mouths like spittle, is “intense.” But it usually seems to apply to a massage or a movement class. When I do chance to overhear of a true test of faith and character, one person telling another, “My father died last Christmas and it was fairly intense, so I went to a bereavement workshop, which helped a lot,” the response she gets is, “Yeah, when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force.”
The subject of Tibet itself, origin of the weekend’s teachings, is dispensed with in three minutes. A man stands up at the mike and mentions that he heard that the “purpose” of the oppression by the Chinese is so that attention would be paid to Tibetan Buddhism by the world at large. A kind of genocidal PR campaign, ordained by karma: Hitler wore khakis. He relays this information as though he were passing on a handy stain-removal tip.
Even the political T-shirt, that ubiquitous (non-dairy) manifestation of principle, is completely absent, unless a teal garment with the words “Susan B. Anthony” scripted in glitter puff-paint counts. And it’s certainly not because of any text-free clothing policy at Omega. I see endorsements for blue-green algae (“food of champions”), Kiss My Face lotion, several polar bears, and an embarrassment of angels (how random, then again . . . maybe not). The only shirt concerned with others is focused on a demographic so remote as to be politically negligible: “U.F.O.ria.”
Physically, Omega resembles nothing so much as a kibbutz. Intensely green and lovely, its architecture utilitarian and simple, serving everyone. And if relentless navel gazing and self-obsession, practiced simultaneously by very large groups of people, somehow equaled communalism, then it would be a kibbutz. Aside from a rather involved busing procedure in the dining hall of having to separate our dishes, cutlery, and compostable and noncompostable trash, the heavy lifting is left up to the young, pierced, dewy, and eminently fuckable staff.
Reading further in my welcome booklet, I see that the Omega Garden is “[b]ased on the raised-bed French intensive method of gardening [and] is the source of many of the vegetables we serve in the Cafe.” This is probably true; it may be a “source,” but it’s doubtful that it’s the bulk, given the garden’s jewel-box size and its hypercosmetic rows of nascent lettuces. It’s like being told that Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid routine kept Versailles in cheese.
A week prior to my arrival at Omega, I was in Disney World with my friend Sarah, where the people on staff are referred to as “cast members”; where we walked from an animatronic display of this nation’s presidents to a simulacrum of Tom Sawyer’s island in under one minute; where, in the middle of lunching on our “Patriot Platter” in the Liberty Tree Tavern, we were visited at table by Goofy, Minnie Mouse, Chip, and Dale. Yet it all felt less ersatz than the faux Arcadianism of Omega. There is nothing wrong, I keep trying to tell myself, with people finding relaxation any way they want. Perhaps there is even something to admire in seeking higher truths in one’s spare time. I certainly manage, over the course of the retreat, to have many interesting conversations about Buddhism with many delightful people. Why, then, as I sit in an Adirondack chair under the spreading boughs of a majestic pine tree, a bed of orange poppies beside me, a brook babbling not ten feet away, do I feel as though I am trapped in hell? Funnily enough, Seagal had described hell as being when “you’re put in a place where everyone has the same delusion.”
The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism. I have ended up for the weekend at a spa that refuses to call itself a spa; an “institute” with a terror of the world so crippling as to have no newspapers. No surprise, really, had I but taken the time, prior to my arrival, to seriously parse the terms “self-help” and “retreat.” The former unabashedly egocentric, the latter alluding to defeated flight.
The evening’s concerts are held in the Lake Theater, a barnlike structure with a small stage. The overhead light is grimy and yellow and flickering as moths and June bugs ping against the bulbs like rice at a wedding. A young folksinger on guitar and piano is accompanied by her ponytailed husband on bass. The audience is sparse, mostly women, alone and in pairs, the demographic hinted at on the first day. They sit with the studied serenity, the composed posture, that broadcasts for all the world to see “I go to things all the time alone. I don’t mind.”
In Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, the heroine Lily Bart—no longer as young as she once was, the financial promises made to her failing to pan out, her prospects at marriage dwindling daily, has a friend named Gerty Farish. Gerty is also unmarried. Gerty has no annuity. Gerty takes her meals in public dining rooms with other single women. And she does so good-naturedly. Every time Lily sees Gerty, she experiences an interval of panic. Wharton writes: “. . . the restrictions of Gerty’s life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded [Lily] too painfully of the limits to which he
r own existence was shrinking.”
After a day of angry, dismissive contempt, the blood beats behind my eyes with identification. I am uncoupled by this unexpected Gerty Farish moment in this crowd of women trying to make sense of a world that has ruled them out of hand for the cardinal sin of having dared to remain single past the age of thirty-five. I have sat alone in theaters, restaurants, parks, my back straight, a book, perhaps. I am acquainted with this good posture.
At one point the singer looks over at her husband and they give each other a smile of such amiable companionship, a look of such pleased and secure partnership, that it reaches all of us with the cold immediacy of a slap in the face. It turns out to be true: when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force.