DRIVING UP CALIFORNIA—PART II

Driving down the state from Ukiah to San Diego turned out to be a pleasant sightseeing journey with time spent alone with one of my sons. Heading back home to Ukiah, however, was a journey of an entirely different sort: This leg of my journey, without a doubt, turned out to be a "A Spiritual Trip."

Before heading north, I spent two days in my son’s apartment on the third floor of a building on fraternity row, which should explain why I found it nearly impossible to sleep. I’m fairly sure I was the only person on the street keeping a schedule fit for human beings. Everyone else, it seemed, was up all night partying.

My son and I spent the first day scrubbing the bathrooms and the second stocking the empty kitchen cupboards. But after two nights of using my pillow to deafen the sounds of the non-stop partying coming from the street outside, I was ready to hit the road. Some old friends in Santa Monica had offered me use of their couch. They warned me I’d have to put up with some fumes because their apartment was being painted but they promised an extremely quiet night.

I eagerly headed onto the freeway connecting San Diego with LA. Between the two cities, the one thing that caught my attention was the sight of a company of Marines at Camp Pendleton, just a few hundred yards from the freeway, practicing search and destroy maneuvers, a reminder that others are experiencing a far different view of reality from mine.

I arrived outside the Bunshaft’s apartment at exactly 1:08 in the afternoon. (It is definitely odd how my mind recalls some random details and not others.) It was great to reconnect with my friends. Because we have known one other for so long, we feel totally comfortable and without any pretense in one other’s presence. Alex was preoccupied with her astrology practice, which she operates out of their apartment so Bob and I went for a walk. Bob has been a high-powered executive in the music world who has never denied his spiritual side. As we walked through Ocean Park, he told me about his recent trip to Southern India where he had gone to study with a woman named Chalanda Sai Ma. While there, he had also seen the well-known Sai Baba known as the "Miracle Guru" who, people say, produces jewels out of ashes in the palm of his hand.

I’m not apt to believe miracles that I don’t see with my own eyes, but I could see my old friend had changed and that his transformation was real. He had integrated a deep silence. As he spoke about spiritual awakening taking place in the world, he was much more centered than I’d remembered. When the two of us returned to the apartment, Alex informed us she’d planned to attend a satsang (a gathering) held by a man called Adyashanti. All she knew about him was that her friends had told her he was an extremely engaging speaker and a learned spiritual guide. "I think we’ll all enjoy it," she said, "I insist." It was obvious she was not taking "no" for an answer. "I’ll pay—it’s my gift."

We arrived at the satsang after the small church had been filled, but found three seats together near the back. Adyashanti turned out to be a complete surprise. When we first saw him take the stage, for one thing he wasn’t an East Indian as I had imagined, given his name, but a vibrant Westerner in his forties with short gray hair and amazingly bright eyes that sparkled with an unnerving clarity.

Adya, as he is called, spoke without using the "spiritual speak" of a guru, but in very real and to-the-point language about the underlying truths of existence—mostly about finding the silence that exists beneath the surface of things. What was interesting was the longer he spoke the more the church took on the quality of silence he was speaking about.

After his opening talk about the simplicity of finding this silence, Adya invited members of the audience to come up, one at a time, to the stage to sit in the chair beside him. The people asked questions about various spiritual experiences. At one point, while discussing with a woman her struggle to find the deeper meaning of life, he described his own struggle as a seeker of truth. He recounted a time when he was a student at a Zen monastery where he was the first to show up at morning meditation practice and the last to leave at night. He said he was always trying harder than anyone to get to where he was going.

"Struggle" was something I related to and before I even thought about it I felt my hand go up. Adya waved me up to the stage where I suddenly found myself sitting in the chair next to him speaking into a microphone to the assembled audience. "My whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been struggling. It’s like I’ve been riding on a train chugging along the tracks on a long journey, always struggling to get somewhere." I found myself looking into his eyes as I spoke, feeling somehow that I was in the presence of someone with real knowledge. Then I heard him say, "think of me as the train wreck."

I felt a kind of "whoosh" of understanding. I immediately "got" what he meant. There was no doubt. He was speaking the Truth, with a "capital T" about me. Then he said, "you can stop—you can get off the train." Instantly, I felt a great relief. I understood that all the struggle, all the searching I’d been doing, had gotten me nowhere even after all those years spent riding the train. Whatever it was I was looking for I already had. Then he suggested I simply walk away from the train wreck.

That night on the Bunshaft’s couch I fell into a deep sleep. I awoke at 2:00 in the morning and there in the living room I experienced the silence Adyashanti had spoken of. It was all around me. I was hoping it wasn’t an experience caused simply by the paint fumes. But it seemed to be a real and palpable silence. And, like he said, it was in everything. So I tested it: I looked at the jamb around the doors to the balcony. The silence was there too.

After another day in Santa Monica and another night spent on the couch, I headed out. When I was back on the road again I found my journey northward to be unusually pleasant. I took Route 1 along the coast witnessing some of the most extraordinary scenery on earth. That night I stopped in Big Sur at a roadside inn called Deetjen’s and fell into a deep sleep in my small bungalow while a fire in the fireplace warmed the room. The next morning, after a blueberry pancake breakfast, I climbed a path along a stream up to a ridge overlooking the Pacific. There I sat down in a meadow just to take in all the miraculous beauty around me,
surprised at how much of it I was noticing.

I was at the same height as the top of the fog hanging above the ocean. It looked as if the view stretched into infinity: There was no horizon, only the sea and the sky melting into one another.
Since I have always been someone who likes to always be "doing" something, sitting on a path and taking the time to notice the world around me was a very new and different experience for me. But the best part about the simple experience of feeling the silence is how it comes not from striving to find it, but from doing just the opposite.

Posted by Tony at April 8, 2005 12:55 PM