My parents came into the city for their once a week dinner with their black sheep son. In my father’s defense, during his Peace Corp days he was worked long days in the desert with no companionship other than the sheep. And to tell you the truth, I actually look forward to being sheared weekly, uh, shorn [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lLb31ZxGk].
When in my apartment, a book on my bookshelf caught my Dad’s attention. “What’s this book?” he queried.
“That’s Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damndest Thing by Jed McKenna. He’s this white dude who apparently is enlightened and kinda rags on a lot of the other methods and practices that people do, saying they have nothing to do with enlightenment. He can sound kind of arrogant at times but I think he really challenges the yoga poser concept of what is enlightenment,” I answered.
“Can I borrow it?” Apparently my summary really piqued his interest; either that or he liked the cover.
“No, I think it’s important for it to gather even more dust than it has on it,” I sarcasticated before taking it off the shelf and giving it to him.
I used to be really anal with my books, barely cracking the cover as I read them so to keep them clean and pristine and ready to sell on Amazon.com in case I ever grew tired of my gig giving handjobs on the West Side Highway. One time I lent my Dad Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic by Osho, telling him it was the first book I found that spoke to my truth more than any other book I had ever read and he returned it with pen comments throughout and I nearly killed him. But then I figured he may only have a few more years in him anyway and when he kicks I could look back nostalgically at his comments and think, “That dead mother fucker sure knew how to screw up the resale value of a book!”
Next week my folks came back for another dinner. Being a starving swami, I accept any free meal offered, even if that entails opening with my Mom asking me for the umpteenth time if I’m ever going to cut my hair and having to spend half the dinner talking about how I could better market myself and the other half in praise of Obama’s Socialist agenda. The McKenna book provided a welcome respite from our usual routine.
“I have to say, I didn’t really love this book. This guy is clearly into himself,” started my father.
“I told you that he comes across like that. But did you get anything out of what he wrote?”
“He kept saying that ‘All that matters is Truth.’ I didn’t really know what he meant by that, ‘Truth.’ I mean, whose truth, his? His religion’s? His guru’s?
“He didn’t have a guru,” I said.
Just then the waitress of the Japanese restaurant came with those hot towels to treat yourself to a 10-second steam facial and shave off a few weeks of your life by breathing in the thirty-two toxic chemicals they contain. I believe it is them trying to get back at us for the whole Hiroshima bombing thing. “Anything to drink?” she pestered and I said, “Just get us some green tea and leave us the hell alone until we call you over.” I always had a way with women.
I went back to my Dad. “So, what was it that you had a problem with regarding ‘Truth’?”
“How does one define ‘Truth’ anyway? It can mean different things to different people,” he said.
“Well, how would you define ‘Truth’ for you?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. That’s a good question.”
“It’s an important question,” I emphasized.
“I guess living ethically and morally—“
“That’s just societal brainwashing,” I interjected. I couldn’t let my Dad get off so easy after having to put up with all the Obama cheerleading and the shearing, uh, shoring of wool off my lower back each week.
“Living ethically and morally according to my own principles regarding myself and relating to others,” he came back.
“Okay. So let’s call that ‘Your Truth.’ So imagine you go to a family event. Can you see how relating with others ethically and morally according to your own principles would be an important thing for you?” I was leading him on, just like I do the men at the bars who I coax home to my place and then Dahmer them. While I was more in the mood to eat veggie rolls than human flesh, I was getting ready for my father to explore the taste of his own understanding of Truth.
“Sure.”
“Let’s say you found yourself sacrificing your personal morals in order to deal with some jackass relative. Can you see how this would be in direct violation of ‘Your Truth’ and how regardless of whether you were ‘socially correct’ in dealing with this moron, you would feel frustrated because you fell out of living ‘Your Truth’?”
“I can see that,” he said.
“And can you see how you being a gym teacher for thirty-one years had little to really do with Who You Are and living ‘Your Truth’? How whether you stayed connected to ‘Your Truth’ or not was irrespective of the job you were performing? Sure, some jobs or activities can make it easier for us to stay connected to ‘Our Truth,’ but what we actually do is pretty irrelevant to living Truth.” I thought I’d take a sledgehammer to his sense of “Self” while I had him on the ropes.
My Dad got it. I went on. “It’s not saying that family is not important to you but if you were not living your personal ethics and morals with your family, could you see how that would be living in a Hell of sorts?” He agreed. “So maybe we can say ‘Enlightenment’ is just: LIVING YOUR TRUTH REGARDLESS OF THE SITUATION. If you can stay connected to ‘Your Truth’ in any situation, then perhaps you are living Enlightenment.”
My Dad took in that last bit and after a slight pause of reflection concluded, “That makes sense to me.”
I had managed to boil down a complicated subject, essentially “What is Truth?” and take it out of the world of philosophers and into the realm of, “So how do I apply this in the real world?” for my Dad. I have seen all too often, and a problem my Dad voiced regarding Jed McKenna, how many “teachers” only share impractical philosophy with their students, more concerned with how “wise” they appear in their students’ eyes than performing the true role of a teacher of helping clear his students’ lenses of all distortion and allowing them to see the Truth for themselves.
We also talked about how the guru’s job—not that McKenna signed up to be anyone’s guru—was about bringing his students to a place of clearer understanding, not being an upright citizen or believing in non-violence or some other saintly archetype of “guru” that we have created out of our imagination. If they did this, which for me Jed McKenna did, then they have served their purpose and whether they rob hubcaps or sit in the Vatican and molest little boys is immaterial to what I have to gain from them.
While McKenna may come across at times as arrogant, I have found his teachings very valuable in breaking down a lot of the bullshit that perhaps even I had swallowed regarding spirituality and enlightenment. On reflection, I wondered whether I was coming to the defense of not just Jed McKenna but also myself for the seeming arrogance that may on occasion slip into my writing and teachings when I find myself frustrated with how stupid everyone is compared to me.
Our conversation felt much better than my usual way of dealing with my frustration that these old fools couldn’t seem to grasp a basic concept of spirituality and thus could never understand me or my path and responding with something like, “It’s amazing that you have thirty more years of life experience than me and have the spiritual development of a 2-year old.” Which reminds me of when in high school my English teacher Mr. Lange told me, “You have the maturity of a 3-year old chimpanzee.” Mr. Lange ended up getting in trouble for his comment when the Chimpanzee’s Are People Too (CAPT) organization filed a complaint that comparing chimpanzees to a moron like myself was insulting to chimpanzees. I didn’t pay their comment any heed, as I was too busy swinging around the room with a banana in my hand while throwing my feces at everyone in range.
REFLECTION:
What is “Your Truth”? Forget about what you think it “should” be according to your church or family or the latest New-Age book you espouse. Is there anything more important to you than living “Your Truth”? How does your work and/or other activities reflect “Your Truth”? Can you bring “Your Truth” into everything you do? What would that be like?
MEDITATION:
Pick a phrase or a few words or an image or a feeling to represent “Your Truth.” Imagine yourself going through your day and regardless of what occurs—you miss the bus, you bump into a difficult person, you step in a puddle, you are complimented for a job well done—are you still living “Your Truth” during the rollercoaster called Life? Or did you stray from being in “Your Truth” because of a difficult person or difficult situation or did a huge compliment shift you to living in Ego over Truth? What would your life be like if you lived constantly in “Your Truth”? Can you think of something more important that that?