I find myself saying several times a day now, "I’m just glad to be alive." The last two people I’ve emailed today, I’ve said it to. I had an appointment with a photographer this morning and I said it to him. What I’m thinking of here, is that having had open heart surgery, and then a repair to that, has changed me. In the first place it was so unexpected, so surprising to me that it happened at all—which alone could’ve changed me. But having been otherwise a healthy and vigorous sort of person, it just seemed so odd that I had trouble believing that the doctor was talking about me when he was explaining the procedure I was to undergo. At one point I joked with him, "are you sure you have the right guy? I mean, aren’t I too young and don’t feel to good to have something seriously wrong?" But of course, his answer was a serious. "If we don’t do the surgery, you have a very good chance of dying of a major heart attack in the next 12 months."
Okay then, it is me you’re talking about.
Following the "I’m just happy to be alive" thought is the feeling of needing to take advantage of each minute. Again, this may sound like a cliché but it’s what is on my mind now and I think it’s an important sentiment to share with you. Every choice I make must answer the question: "Am I following my bliss?" The only things I want to do, are the things that make me happy and make those around me happy. I realize now that here, in my own heart is where the healing begins—whatever I find good and true in me will end up being good and true for the world as a whole.
I’ve taken a break, the past week or so, to revisit the hospital—it seems that one of the new veins in my heart didn’t want to stay open—so they puffed it up, added a metal thing called a stent to keep it open and sent me home again. While in the hospital this time, I began to write again and am happy to be back at it. After all, it’s what I do. Being preoccupied with words is so much more pleasant than being preoccupied with medical things. I’ve always enjoyed NOT thinking about physical ailments and have been blessed all my life—until now—with good health. Actually, I’m feeling healthy once again and hope the worst is over.
One of the most important things I’ve learned from my recent travails is how many kind people I have around me. I thank any of you who happen to read this—you know who you are! I’ve also, not surprisingly, gained a much deeper appreciation of the value of being alive. In a way, I think that’s the main lesson I am supposed to take home with my reconditioned heart. I think my heart repairs have an awful lot to do with learning to feel, appreciate and love—the main roles the heart plays.
Within two years of leaving the "fishing business" I found that I had managed to follow Hans Sebbelov’s instructions. I had learned to meditate—my instructor was Kenny Edwards who was much better known at the time as lead guitarist for Linda Ronstadt’s band the Stone Ponies. I had moved across country having secured a simple job working on a loading dock for a computer modem company. My other duty was to drive the CEO back and forth to the airport in a new Lincoln Towncar—it turned out I was his favorite driver, probably because I could make the trip faster than anyone else in the company.
As soon as I had saved enough money I quit my job, broke up with my half-Japanese girlfriend and headed off to a small seaside resort village in Spain where Maharishi had rented a hotel and hundreds of private homes (it was off-season) and was holding a teacher training course for over a thousand meditators from around the world. I arrived eager to learn whatever Maharishi had to teach. I was open and eager and about to embark on my journey to enlightenment.
Hans Sebbelov a white-haired, white-bearded Dutchman, about 75 years old, walked with a pronounced limp. A friend of the Captain of my boat, he arrived at our dock out of breath. The Captain embarrassed that he and the crew had been caught passing around a joint, invited Hans aboard anyway. It was Hans who had introduced the captain to TM (Transcendental Meditation) a year or so prior and then left for India where his doctor had sent him to find a cure for a strange disease for which no doctor had been able to offer any hope. Hans had returned from studying for months at Maharishi’s feet, with tremendous hope. Sitting with us that evening, he described these incredible powers he had been taught; he was able to travel throughout his body—through his bloodstream and into all the various organs as if he was a miniature cartoon doctor. The best thing was, he wasn’t fake. It was obvious to me—his descriptions were so vivid and real—that he was watching himself from inside while he was describing it to us.
I spent the evening walking around the harbor with Hans eager to hear everything I could about these miraculous goings on. Eventually, we took his Volkswagen bug to a coffee shop where we drank bottomless cups of coffee and smoked his Winston cigarettes. Hans seemed to be able to answer the Big Questions I had been struggling with. Or—perhaps it was not Hans at all—for his smiling round face and white beard had transformed into Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was Maharishi talking to me. It was in the VW bug that I received a set of simple instructions for living: Learn how to meditate. Get a small apartment and live on my own. Give up women for a while. And, find a simple job like driving a truck.
Within the next few months I had accomplished all but the second. And of course, he was right about that, and that relationship ended up making me suffer miserably until I was able to escape it as well, and surrender to Pure Knowledge. But that night at the harbor was definitely a turning point for me, it was from the depths of despair that I began to climb to the heights of happiness. I went from literally living below sea level to living high in the Alps within a few years.
When I returned from Vietnam I went, almost immediately, in search of my Guru, as people said then—the year being 1969. Looking back on my life it is easy to see why things happened when they did—there is a definite, clear linear progression and order to my life. There was the War Experience that shook up my life. To put it simply, when I returned, I was dazed and confused. That period, beginning in October of 69 was without a doubt, the strangest part of my life. I had moved into an apartment on Gainsborough Street in Boston with my old prep school roommate. He had just returned from California where he’d discovered hallucinogens—You want to see God? Drop acid. I think he actually spoke those words. So I did, and that was the beginning of something as frightening and strange as Vietnam in it’s own way. But, looking back, that phase was necessary too—it broke down more of the mind’s barriers, whatever few were still left standing. Vietnam had already blasted through many of one’s ideas of normal existence. The war made a hand grenade of everything we took for granted, chucked it away, exploded it and left only a crater full of questions in its place. The drugs were like the wind that blew away whatever thoughts of normalcy could have possibly remained.
So I arrived in Santa Barbara, California on one perfect, sunny day (the yearly mean temperature there is a nearly perfect-feeling 68 degrees) totally devoid of any sense of who I was—totally unsure about any sort of rational order to life. I owned one patched pair of jeans, a few shirts and a sleeping bag which I ended up living in, in the hold of a broken down anchovy boat down in the marina. There was no place lower to go than the hold of a fishing boat; it’s below sea level. But it was there one evening, while passing around a joint, that the next phase began.
Although I’m not sure exactly who this Buddha is I’m speaking about, I do feel certain I have a Buddha healing me. It is more a Buddha of my own creation than an actual incarnation of the Great One. I am not a Buddhist in the traditional sense although I just might qualify because I am a seeker. I am constantly looking for the answers to Big Questions and always trying to get to the truth. I don’t think this makes me unusual—on the contrary, I think it makes me similar to most people because I think most of us are doing the same thing—whether we know it or bother to admit it or not.
My path has been anything but straight and narrow; it has been full of ups and downs and twists and turns. At times my journey has come to an abrupt stop and then somehow restarted from a totally different place altogether.
Where I find myself now, at the inception of my journal, is at the beginning of something bigger as well. I have just been born—or reborn. I have been given a new chance at living. What that means to me is a lot of things but it means especially that this time I don’t want to blow it. I want to do things right this time—to use my time for making a difference—I want to be on the good team!
It has been exactly two weeks since a surgeon opened my chest and replaced four arteries in my heart with a vein from my leg. Before the operation, to convince you everything is going to turn out fine, people will tell you, "they do these operations all the time—they’re wheeling people in and out of the operating room all day long." This may be true except you tend to see things differently when you’re the one looking up from the gurney being wheeled into the operating room. The intrusion into the body was huge, the body’s reaction was huge and so the healing process I’m going through now has to be equal in strength.
The thought of trekking through the Himalayas in Tibet and Nepal with my sons helps me to heal. It is something at the top of my wish list. It has been important for me to hang onto a dream like this—one firmly planted in this world—to help hold me here on this planet. There was a moment following my operation—still dazed and confused by the anesthesia and all the drugs in my system—when I felt like I was balancing on the edge between life and death, thinking the pain from the operation was so great it might just not be worth living. I could feel myself start to slip which immediately warned me I’d better not mess around with thoughts like that. But this taught me something valuable—just how short the distance is between here and there. This image was unmistakable and indelible.
Today is the holiest day of the year according to the Hindu calendar —Mahalakshmi. It’s only morning and already I feel I’ve received a gift of great fortune. While I was meditating, the word "fulfillment" floated into my head. The word seemed to arrive as a sort of unmarked package on my doorstep with no return address—the kind of package the UPS man leaves that nobody has to sign for so you wonder what it is and who sent it. I imagine after tearing open the brown paper of the package that I find a small box floating under the sea of packing material—the kind of box that might contain a piece of jewelry or a watch. But in this case, the box is empty; someone forgot to put the present in. Or did they? My great teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi often uses the seed as an example. He says that inside the seed you find nothing but emptiness—but contained in the emptiness is the full-grown tree complete with its trunk and branches and leaves and all its fruit.
I think what is contained in the empty box—is nothing but fulfillment. This is the day we chose to launch the web site for Beneath Buddha’s Eyes. It is also the day my book is shipping from the printer. I feel a huge sense of fulfillment and I’m sure that is the gift I’ve been given.