It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

What It Was Like
Labor Day, 1998
Portland, Oregon

Twenty years ago today was the worst day of the Fred unit’s life. It was Labor Day Monday, 1998. Fall was in the air, the nights were getting chilly, and I was living in the bushes at the bottom of a hill in Mt. Tabor City Park in Portland, Oregon. Wait, that’s not quite right. Actually, I was dying in those bushes, a burned up old wino finally sputtering its way off the planet.

Worst of all, I was out of booze, and out of money. The last money I had came when I sold my sleeping bag to an outdoor shop so I could fend of the midnight chill with liquor, instead of goose down. It was another in a long string of really bad ideas.

I had a lung infection that featured a frighteningly terrible cough, and left my voice sounding like barbed wire. Not that I was really talking to anyone other than myself, but it was still rather haunting. Although I was completely unaware, this teaching was already in full force, but it wasn’t attracting much in the way of followers at that time. It was busy prepping the unit for the endless suffering it would require before it would finally, years later, in a living room 2,800 miles away, completely give up on itself.

Of course, my conditions on that day shouldn’t have been a shock: I had had quite a bit of experience in living on the edge. Decades of it.

During that same year of 1998, I had already spent homeless time in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Columbia, SC, Big Sur, California, and everyplace in between them. That was after having spent some time living in my soon-to-be-sold-for-booze-money automobile, upon the streets of the aforesaid Portland. As always, I was running, and as always, I was running in circles.

It was my 9th bout with homeless. As I’ve said before, that couldn’t just happen because of bad luck, that took real skill. Although I’d always been pulled in exactly the opposite direction, I seemed determined to go down in flames at the very earliest opportunity.

A unit can run as fast and as far as it wants to in an attempt to distance itself from itself, but in the end, it’s always a losing proposition. Everywhere I went, there Fred was, and where there was a Fred, trouble and suffering couldn’t be far behind. That’s the way it had been since the unit was just a boy, and it would turn forty-six the following month, a boy only in terms of maturity.

Spending a birthday homeless, middle-aged, essentially helpless, hapless, and alone gives one ample room for thought. What I thought was that I was unlucky as hell. I thought there must be some sort of plot designed to keep Fred down, and as paranoid as that sounds, I was correct in my assessment – there really was a plot.

What I was missing was that fredness was the uncredited author of that plot. Perhaps most incredible of all was that a nondual awakening event had occurred six years prior to this disaster. Notice that it hadn’t saved fredness from fredness. Yet.

 What Happened
2000-2018
Columbia, SC

The unit’s OCD-alcoholism resisted stable sobriety through this unit for another 18 months before body and mind were worn down to a smoldering nub of meat that was finally desperate enough to allow for change, and too beat up to continue to follow its own management. I went to 12-step recovery (yet again!) and turned myself in, like some errant jailbreaker sheepishly returning to the sheriff. At long last, the journey toward sanity had begun in earnest. Most people would say “back to sanity”, but so far as I can tell, there was never any rationality here to begin with.

Ever.

I can’t claim today that I’ve actually reached soundness of mind (or body), but in the absence of my crazed helplessness, there have been some mighty strides made in that direction. It started with sobriety, which I didn’t do, and then got a total kick in the ass upon a second nondual awakening which I also didn’t do. That occurred in September, 2006, but it would take years before it really sank in.

I got an authentic glimpse of truth back in 1992, but left to my own devices, ego ate it up and spat Fred out. I then went fourteen years without another awakening, while simultaneous being haunted by the (faulty) memory of the first one.

In twelve-step recovery they say that it takes five years to find your marbles, and another five to figure out what to do with them. A similar case could be made for post-awakening. I’d heard Adyashanti make an analogous statement using five and fifteen years when I was about six months in, and I decided he didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t know me, and he was wrong.

Nope. He was dead right, and I was dead wrong. Again.

The awakening wasn’t the end of insanity, or even the end of seeking (which, in my case, slowly dropped away), but it was the start of something entirely new: an authentic spiritual journey.

The next three years were hard. I didn’t have a teacher, and was both too arrogant and afraid to reach out to one. I knew I was “awake”, but I was afraid a teacher would tell me I was just nuts instead. Awakeness had woken up to truth, but the fredness conditioning had not. Like a ceiling fan slowly spinning out after it’s been cut off, the unit continued to dance out its dance. It can’t not. And it is still doing so, but at least it’s not quite so noticeable to outsiders looking in. I guess that’s why they haven’t found it necessary to put me in a mental hospital for a third time. Yet.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s been no graduation here, even though fredness would absolutely love that. There are still plenty of nutty thoughts showing up over here, but happily this head is not made of glass, so you (generally speaking) can’t witness it. Much, much, less apparent unskillfulness gets played out on the stage of the world. I now look and act pretty much “normal”- whatever that is. It’s all smoke and mirrors, but I can live up to the adjective “reasonable” most of the time.

I’ve discovered that I don’t really know what’s good for this unit. I always thought I did, but since all of my cleverness eventually left me in a state of misery, I’ve come to see that was incorrect.

 What It’s Like Now
Labor Day, 2018
Heaven

I woke up this morning in the softest, warmest, most pillowed bed I have ever known. A little brown dog was absolutely bent on snuggling up next to me, and licking my ears. I let him. Betsy was off visiting her dying dad, but in her place was a little white dog, curled up peacefully. Willy owns this unit at night, but he lets Jack spend time with it in the morning, which is generous. They play together a lot, but they never really squabble. I think they might have picked up that pattern of living up from Betsy and me.

We call Clarity House our “home of peace”. It is a splendid thing to wake up every morning to find myself held within the arms of a loving and peaceful world.

It’s still hot in South Carolina, but the house was cool and dry. We have adjustable weather in our home! Listen, if it’s hot outside, we can make it cool, and if it’s cold we can make it warm, and come rain or storm, we stay high and dry. Wow! I could hardly believe my good fortune. I got up and went into my very own bathroom, which comes complete with a lockable door! Unbelievable. It’s quite a switch from the utter vulnerability and frustration one feels when tramping outdoors in a city.

I went next to the short chrome-and-glass fridge in my study and pulled out a small drink. It was cool and fresh, with a jolt of caffeine, but completely alcohol free. (!) I could’ve had orange juice, V8, grape juice, a yogurt smoothie, Diet Coke, Diet Ginger Ale, or all the water I wanted, but first thing in the morning I notice I always reach for a ludicrously priced 8.2 ounce sugar free Red Bull. Has there ever been a king with more options?

Miraculously, I haven’t had a thought about popping a beer for breakfast in over 18 years. I don’t even miss it! Astonishing.

I sat down at my big-screen PC to find a reminder note to call the security company about a small glitch, a fun note from PayPal, a warm note from my perfect wife, and gratitude mail from some of this teaching’s followers. It’s a great way to wake up, let me tell you. 

Life is good, except for when it sucks, which means it’s still good, only turned upside down. It won’t stay upside down. There’s a perfect thing going on around here. But only One of them. 

Who would have ever guessed it?