About this time, the same friend who had recommended the Buddhism course to me; and whom, I had convinced to enroll in as well, said something to me which I’ll never forget. He was facing the same term paper as I on—E M P T I N E S S, when he remarked, in passing—there’s got to be a shortcut. He did not say exactly: there’s got to be an easier way—you see, he was thinking of all of those lifetimes of lifetimes of lifetimes of… prerequisites just as I was. He said: there must be a shorter route to liberation. And he laughed. He laughed and a light bulb went off in my mind, as they say—yes, there must be a shortcut—a way to achieve the goal of L I B E R A T I O N in this lifetime!
The this-lifetime-of-it stuck in my teeth and I began to chew it over. This lifetime, not ten-thousand lifetimes hence: This transmigration, this birth, this year, this day, this moment
Three, two, one, zero, ignition….
I was born in 1955, in the West, the United States of America, into a white rising middle class family, in the pre- civil rights era South, in the uptown section of New Orleans, Louisiana. I think of the exploding of the atom bomb with its miraculously burgeoning mushroom cloud and all of its implications for my generation, of John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you…” speech and of his head thrown backwards suddenly by the impact of high-powered projectiles his wife Jackie scampering onto the rear of a black Lincoln convertible to retrieve portions of her beloved’s brain casing, I hear the shots, I hear the sound of U.S. army helicopters—chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop—mingling with the sonorous intonations of Walter Cronkite, I remember the nightly body count from Vietnam, I smell the evening meal of pot roast and boiled new potatoes, the meatloaf, the roast cow’s tongue, liver and onions, gumbo, fried Louisiana jumbo shrimp—I hear the clock ticking, ticking, ticking… as its pendulum swung the minutes late while my mother waits, while we all wait, waited… for the explosive return of my father from a bar. He will be jovial perhaps. It will be ten past 6:00 when he arrives. On a Friday he will probably be later. My mother will be nervous about his returning: will he make it home safely, will he have an accident on the way home from Arnaud’s restaurant? Will he have had two martinis, or, half a dozen? Will he be flirting with every skirt in town!? Will he show up so--
drunk and arrogant that there will certainly be trouble? Surely there will be trouble. There’s always trouble. I spill my milk purely by accident. I’m beginning to feel nervous, unconsciously so. My mother explodes: You’ve spilled your milk! Damn you! Can’t you watch what you’re doing!?
I see us all seated around that dinner table. We’ll be waiting in my mind just like that the moment the Russians drop the big one on us—then, all of a sudden, I see it: three, two, one, zero, ignition! We have ignition! The behemoth Saturn V launch vehicle, liquid propellant erupting into clouds of whiteness on the black and white screen of my imagination….
Looking backward, or, inward into the records of my personal intellect, I realize now that the moment I entertained the notion that liberation was not a far-off abstraction but an urgent contemporaneous issue was actually the precise point of ignition for me upon this so-called path toward liberation. The moment I said—now—this life—it was the—“we—have—go— we—have—ignition” moment of my life.
Somehow, my college friend, Dan Carroll, the woodwind twitter of his free-flowing laughter and the plain simple statement: “There must be a shortcut”, in response to the complexities and ardors of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism as presented to us by Professor Hopkins at UVA in the fall of 1974 when I was yet a boy of nineteen—It was like WOW!! ROGER HOUSTON— we have GO!—ignition, if you know what I mean, man.
Of course, ignition, while it is a critical moment for which a great deal of preparation has been made (oftentimes, lifetimes, unbeknownst to ourselves), not to mention the drama of the countdown— ignition doesn’t always lead to lift off, or, if it does—lift off is not always as easy or as perfect as one would like.
In my case, ignition led to a series of seemingly haphazard events beginning with my decision to quit college—quit everything I had been doing up to that point in my life and pursue an ill-defined path of self-discovery of universal proportions. Naturally this set off a chain-reaction
explosion of anger, sorrow, contempt, confusion and blame in the social arena of my humble world. But, alas, for better or worse, I had become light-wedded, and the far-off glow of the moon must become mine.
Up, Up and…. A W A Y ! ! !
But, I’m getting “out there”. And this is a… correspondence, a “consideration”, a communication… after all. Not just some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, solo indulgence to be buried in the back of some forlorn cave for a few centuries! Let me see if I can focus the picture a bit.
Ignited with the altruistic purpose of “liberating myself from the wheel of the law for the sake of all sentient beings”, I decided I must… “hit the road”, “meet my maker”, and “become one”— or some such vagary. The fact was, I was nineteen and totally lost, dismally unhappy with the questions and the answers I was getting in school. I felt that I knew so little of any real value and so I wanted to learn something else, something other, by living it instead of studying it in a book. But, deeper than that, was a growing yearning inside of me.
I would wake up in sweats late at night from strange dreams breathing in and out like a bellows uncontrollably. Sleep and daydream and waking consciousness seemed to merge into a single state of being which can only be described as longing and despair. Words began to form into prayer-chants spontaneously. I found myself repeating the names of the Pure Land Buddha—Amitabha Amitabha Amitabha Amitabha— Jesus!—Buddha! Mohammed! Krishna!—
Help me! Help! Help! Help me!!
Come to me, save me, take me, take me...
Really. My life began to whirl within a mysterious cloud of longing, despair and heartfelt prayer. Late in the middle of the night lying abed sweating rivers I would
beg to die— I wanted to die — all alone with hot gasps pumping in and out of me—begging and begging and begging—and then— the longing shaped itself into the form of a prayer
I want to die and Come to know my Creator!
That’s it!!!
I WANT TO DIE AND COME FACE TO FACE WITH MY GOD!!
Of course, a prayer can hang with you for days and weeks and months even: I want to die and meet my maker, I want to die and be reborn, I want to die to this world and experience perfect spiritual union, I want to be one whole free….
These turbulent months stretched on indeed— dark, agonizing inward months of beggarly craving. I was spiritually hungry. I wanted to taste
G O D
What else could I call it? Who else could I summon? But, you have to appear calm and cool on the surface, especially when you’ve just laid waste to all of your parents’ well-laid hopes and dreams. You must come up with a plan, and, you must not sound too crazed, too far-out, like— I’m going to the Himalayas to seize God by the hallowed beard and wrestle the Truth out of Him or die trying!
I will not go into the many supernatural events and timely encounters, the lucid dreams, the stunning visions, the “agonies and ecstasies”—which we all have experienced following the moment of ignition upon the spiritual path. Suffice it to say, strange things happen, strange people arise
“faces come out of the rain…. when you’re strange,
when you’re…”
One moment apparently leads to another and another, subtly… indecipherably—the book of life gets written without pen or ink, with no paper—the author can only be guessed at
By July of 1975, I had moved into 1607 Race Street in the Capitol Hill area of Denver, Colorado. At first I had considered the move, from my birthplace in New Orleans to Denver, as a stepping-off point on my journey toward the beckoning mysteries of the Far East, i.e., Northern India, Nepal and Tibet… The large Victorian home, neatly painted with various warm mustardy hues to accent the intricacies of finely crafted period woodworking, and, sporting a large sunburst, or, hand-carved wooden sunrise, over the curved wrap-around porch entrance, sat on a spacious corner lot. The noble house, surrounding gardens, and a size-able carriage barn which had been converted into living quarters, served as a preparatory center for a spiritual organization called the Divine Light Mission. A large sign on the front lawn
— THE DIVINE SHELTER —
attested to the fact that this was not the whereabouts of: the Agape Force, the Anandamargas, the Holy Order of Man, nor Yogananda’s Place. My first real job as a college dropout was as a house painter.
pp. 6-12. From a curious, unfinished work entitled: Me, Myself and the Lord of the Universe. Written entirely about my twentieth year… my year of sabbatical leave from UVA… from the perspective of what was apparently… forty-five years of age?
