This wee parable speaks to the Vedanta practice of clearing up the psychic remnants leftover, sometimes for scores of years, from childhood. Often otherwise self-realized people are denied the freedom from the person that is the hallmark of freedom.
To say what I am instead of who I am is to merely say I am, without implied modifiers. It is to see what is without comment, or if so inclined, to only say, “It is what it is” and watch the mind fall silent. But a miraculous force somehow adds a body and a mind endowed with attributes, qualities, talents and abilities to this ever-present unborn I am, so adjectives and adverbs are warranted. Therein lies a who and a sea of stories.
When you get right down to it, you need to keep an eye on the rear-view mirror because success and failure, as the case may be, can always be traced to the five or six years when you are truly adaptive. Once the concrete sets up the remaining seventy is more or less habit. Mother please, I’d rather do it myself! Off come the trainer wheels and off you wobbly pedal to explore the vast mysterious world out there, which always entails cuts and bruises, sometimes much worse. Keep those few years close and mine that seam of gold until it runs out.
Parents count. Mine evidently needed another someone to love once they were satisfied they loved each other sufficiently, which happened after a considerable period of sexless good old-fashioned courtship. They really believed the death do us part bit, so one contributed a sperm, the other an egg, as one does, and in due time the miraculous force that generates every object that presents itself to the all-pervasive ever-present unborn What generated a small love object called me. It’s good they did it right because they had no idea that their darling bundle of joy needed a bit or work more or less on arrival. I was wanted, loved and pampered and I was a handful. I never thought to blame them for my miseries, which I didn’t understand until much later were merely the elite gratuitous miseries of the entitled. Rather I pitied them and loved them unconditionally.
I realized at the tender age of six that the life we all love so much because it gifts this miraculous inner light which illumines an equally miraculous world, isn’t necessarily the bed of roses one might reasonably expect it to be. For fear of seeming ungrateful I won’t use the word perverse, but any reasonably conscious being can’t help but notice that the long journey stretching out before us is consistently peppered with obstacles large and small by no fault of our own. Before I learned to gracefully hurdle, I tried to sneak around them when nobody was looking. If that strategy failed, I’d batten down the hatches, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead, to use a metaphor I picked up from my affectionate and courageous Dad, whose stint as a Seabee contributed to the timely end of the war to end all wars and provided a wealth of nautical metaphors, ship-shape and Bristol fashion, for instance. And who, by the grace of the merciful all knowing witness of our thoughts ended my dislike of authorities in general at the tender age of thirteen with one dispassionate well-timed knock on my arrogant noggin that left me unable to reply in an appropriate and timely fashion in so far as I was out cold on the kitchen floor. At that moment Dad became a friend for life.
They loved us unconditionally so they didn’t need to question their parenting skills but perhaps they did owing to my relentless undiscriminating exuberant antics. My brother and I succeeded irrespective of life’s numerous slings and arrows. We were raised in a small town and had mother not planted the seed of knowledge so enthusiastically I may have discovered a certain satisfaction in trucks, the companionship of dogs and guns, pickup sports and my high school sweetheart, the girl next door, not to mention steelhead fishing, cheap beer and a nicotine stain on the index finger. It wasn’t a bad life after all. In fact, it qualifies as a happy childhood.
I remember drunkenly lobbing an egg from the back row of an auditorium in Spokane that smashed squarely on Fats Domino’s grand piano, sawing down a huge billboard advertising insurance with my bros, regularly downing several six packs of Ranier stubbies on the banks of the Snake river of Hells Canyon fame on Friday nights, purloining unattended gas-guzzling gleaming chrome behemoths just for the hell of it and engaging in other various and sundry sophomoric pranks too stupid and numerous to mention.
Let’s just say I was locked into the boys will be boys Zeitgeist, which at seventeen I was assured wasn’t all bad. I asked the tweeded avuncular Dr. Walter Puddy, the only shrink in a three hundred mile radius in whose company I spent a fair amount of time for subsequent transgressions, what was wrong with me. After a judicious pause during which he tamped a pinch of fragrant tobacco into in his trusty Meerschaum and took a deep drag, he replied, “Well, Jim, “At worst I’d say you are slightly maladjusted, but considering the times I’d say it Is a good sign.” Whew! And some people these days want to dial the clock back to the Fifties?
In any case, I was a rebel without a cause, a Jimmy Dean among Jimmy Deans. The event bubbling up from the depths of the past to tickle my mind and kickstart this stream of consciousness today happened in geometry class when I was sixteen. It changed my life forever. I arrived in Daddy Meyers class with shackled pants, a carefully promenaded duck tail and the left sleeve my immaculate white logo-free T-shirt tidily wrapped around my trusty pack of Lucky Strikes just above the bicep.
Daddy Meyers was a drunk who owed his job to his wife, the principal’s secretary, who ruled the school with an iron fist. Sober, he was competent enough to teach a bunch of small town yahoos, not so much hungover. On this fateful day, brain fog prevailed. He dutifully wrote out the quotidian proof on the blackboard, unaware of a glaring logical mistake in the penultimate line and asked, “Any questions class?”
I don’t know what got into me…actually I do…but how could I let such an egregious error prevail? My head turned sideways and my best friend, who was sitting right behind me and must have seen it coming, put a cigarette between my lips. I dutifully ignited my Zippo, inhaled, stood up, walked to the front of the room, pushed Daddy into his chair where he cowered in terror behind his big oak desk, erased line six, entered the proper symbols, turned toward the class, took a deep drag on the Lucky and said, “Any questions class?”
Needless to say, this small drama mercifully saved me from the pulp mill, 2.2 offspring and life in small town picket fence America once and for all. Nothing wrong with it if you’re suited for it, but it is not my cup of tea. My brother never forgave me; he ended up doing all my chores.
I won’t linger, but since we’re in the age of pop psychology here’s my two cents for what it’s worth. Most of us don’t rebel, because fear of authority is necessary for survival. Freedom, however, is the number one need of all human beings, young and old, and emotional attachment, which is usually but incorrectly called love, puts the mind in a bind. Consistent use of power…”Because I told you so!!!…creates suspicion and distrust. Is it any wonder that the family unit is a conspiracy incubator for little people like none other? Kids long to grow, which is accomplished by succeeding and failing, useful information and proper boundaries…”Good fences make good neighbors!” They die on the vine if they slavishly act out the desires of two big children masquerading as adults who purport to love them. The Ku Klux Klan, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Q-Anon and the ring of billionaire-funded vaccine-loving pedophiles tirelessly foisted on us as the root of all evil play second fiddle to none other than the nuclear family. Fortunately my mom and pop, vetted by the Great Depression, which was a an actual depression, and the horrors of war were clear-eyed grownups.
Anyway, time passed and the little rebellions kept adding up until I crossed a big line. I fell in love with a married woman. I won’t go there; you already know the drill. When that love of my life, along with an inordinate obsession with the realm of the senses, specifically sex, food and alcohol, mercifully ended in complete disaster…thank you Jesus…I was willingly suckered into psychedelia which is to say, I “tuned in, turned on and dropped out” to employ the argot of the time. Those exploits are chronicled elsewhere so I won’t repeat them. Yes, I enjoyed the psychedelic extravaganza…learned a lot as they say…until I didn’t. One morning on a peak in Morocco’s Rif mountains it became crystal clear that I was actually the all-seeing eye of consciousness, which put an end to the psychedelic extravaganza and pointed me in a more hopeful direction. In short, I dropped back in. Wretched excess is not a myth to live by.
Time passed again, as it does. There were other incidents but one day I met a wise person who said, “You know, James, you are what you are rebelling against.” Evidently I was ready to hear it because the rebel shuffled off the mortal coil on the spot leaving no longing behind as those words were eaten by the stillness.
