DYING TO HIMSELF: A SHORT STORY

It could be argued that Alex was predisposed to spirituality in so far as his mother in her youth was deeply spiritual, a follower of the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy. And, one summer doing genealogical research, he found others in his family, including his grandfather on his father’s side, who had been Christian Scientists. It was a denomination that believed that human beings and the universe were spiritual as a whole rather than only material. His mother, however, after her marriage to his father, a chemical engineer who believed that everything, including God, could be explained by the laws of thermodynamics, retreated from her faith. This was not to say, though, that she did not feel that her two young sons shouldn’t be given a proper Christian education, and so she asked an older couple, friends of hers who lived up the hill, to give her children a ride each Sunday to the local First Baptist Church. There they would attended Sunday school followed by the main service in the church.

Alex liked his pastor right away. Reverend Nielsen was a big man who looked even bigger in his robes, and whose right hand, like a catcher's mitt, enveloped his completely when they shook hands in the greeting line after the Sunday service. There was not a kinder, gentler man in town he was convinced.

Alex had been christened in the Episcopal Church when he was an infant but now he would be baptized in the Baptist church--well, not literally in the Baptist church as renovations had since begun there. Rather the nearby Methodist church would be used instead. Reverend Nielsen said that God would not mind. It was an experience that Alex would remember always, the dunking in the water in the alcove beside the altar. If he thought he would feel a surge spiritually from it, however, he was dearly disappointed. All he felt was wet. Even so, by the end of the year he was singing in the church choir, attending Vacation Bible School in the summertime, and reading grace before dinner at home every evening, much to his mother’s delight, and his father’s bemusement. He even made an altar in his bedroom at which he had a cross he bought during his sixth grade school trip to Washington, D.C., so that when he announced the next spring that he wanted to become a minister one day, it surprised no one.

Puberty and the beginning of junior high school changed things for him, though. His older brother had begun skipping Sunday school and church to be with a friend of his at a soda fountain down the street from the church, and so naturally Alex went with him. Mitchell couldn’t leave his brother by himself at the church, and besides, if Alex was with him he was not apt to betray him to their parents. But since Alex was older now too, the adventure with his big brother was fair enough.

Soon enough, though, Alex had friends of his own, having joined the junior high school marching band, and then by the ninth grade he even had a girlfriend. And then in his second year in high school, he became a member of the Hi-Yi club, a social club which included a church service each Sunday, a different denomination each time as an education for them. It reminded him how much he missed his spirituality. In fact, he soon began attending the Baptist Church adult education class to make up, in a way, for lost time. It was through this class, as it happened, that he was selected to conduct the church’s annual Youth Sunday service. Then he was invited to be a reader of the Scripture at the High School Senior Sermon the night before his graduation. Just why he was chosen for these roles he did not know, something that others saw in him it seemed, but which he did not see in himself exactly.

That adult education class at the Baptist Church proved more significant for him than he at first realized, for the man conducting the class took it upon himself to teach them about views other than only Christianity. He talked about pantheism, atheism, and agnosticism, and then eastern religions. This permitted Alex to ask a lot of questions and in so doing to enhance his spirituality. This was when he picked up a book on yoga, but not for the physical or Hatha Yoga so much as for the mental or Raja Yoga. There was something there that he needed to know he felt. It seemed to him an avenue to where he really needed to be. This was serious meditation. This was mysticism. There were techniques to be practiced and he did them daily.

Yet two months later he stopped them. Spotting a familiar face in a crowd when the odds of doing so were astronomical was interesting, but it unnerved him. And then when he found that he was able to bring it about at will, he didn't like it at all. “Siddhi” as such things were called, was the last thing he needed, even though they were common in Raja Yoga he later learned, as they were in Tibetan Buddhism where they were an entertainment. His feeling that he had control of them--he experienced several types along the way--let him do them in the beginning, but when they took on a life of their own, he dropped them. There was something here that he learned despite himself, however. There was more to existence than met the eye.

In his sophomore year in college he became increasingly interested in all things oriental, to the point of training in the martial arts, Shodokan Karate. By his junior year in college he was taking classes in eastern religions, recalling his first introduction to them in the Baptist church. Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism put him closer to what he was seeking he felt.

Mr. Augustine, that teacher of the adult education class at the church, turned out to be a graduate student in the drama department at the local university and it was through him that Alex began taking drama classes himself. He was about to graduate in psychology and was interested in psychodrama, a therapeutic technique, so taking an acting class made sense to him. His fascination with psychodrama, however, yielded to an even greater one, the metaphor of theatre, or as the character Jaques says in Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." Humans played roles that were not their true selves really, in other words. The existential theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre caught his attention next, as did the theatre of the absurd, so called, the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. Here were the issues of "God is dead," and, again, how humans only played roles.

Alex's life took a sharp turn three years later. After graduating with a B.A. degree in psychology and an M.A. degree in drama, he was drafted for the Vietnam War. Naturally, he filed for conscientious objector status, opposed as he was, on spiritual grounds, to all violence. His local draft board, however, would have nothing of it. Biased in favor of the war, their souls sold, they rejected his claim, which left him no choice but to formally refuse induction. This he did twice in person at the induction center. His arrest came next, followed by a trial. At the trial, the jury, it turned out, was only allowed to rule on whether he had or had not refused induction, which obviously he had. Convicted, prison was next for him. At the last minute, though, the judge permitted him to be free to be with his family at Christmas following which he would sentence him, three to five years. Still free? Alex was stunned. If this wasn't intervention of the divine kind he didn't know what was. He now had a decision to make. He knew that if he lost his trial, he sure as heck would get no justice in the sentencing, and he saw no benefit in becoming a martyr for the antiwar movement; when he was in prison he would be out of sight, out of mind.

When a pardon came from President Carter in 1977, Alex had the choice of returning to the States from Canada where he had lived in exile for six years now, or staying put. Again a hard decision for him. He was virtually a Canadian. His feeling at the end, however, was that if he had the courage to leave, he should have the courage to go back. Besides he had done nothing wrong by opposing the war, by taking the moral high ground, and his leaving the country after an unjust trial and facing unjust imprisonment was the only level-headed thing for him to do. Who wouldn't?

A doctorate was his achievement when he returned to the U.S., an effort that once again had him studying Beckett and the rest of them, whose philosophy he so greatly related to, knowing all the while this time that God was not dead, or SOMETHING was not dead, and that humans were not just a charade, a sad joke. There was more to it all than this.

During this latest stint in college he painted houses for his uncle part-time to make extra money to live on. One afternoon while hanging on the side of a house, his trusty radio at his side, he happened onto a program on public radio over in the city. It turned out to be a weekly lecture series by Alan Watts, an authority on eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen especially. There was an old saying that when a person was ready for a guru, one would appear. Watts, who never professed to be a guru, even though he was to most people, proved most certainly to be for Alex.

And then there was the lady who lived in the apartment downstairs from him who gave him a novel to read by one Christopher Isherwood. As it happened he had a great deal in common with Isherwood whose biography on the back of the book revealed that he, Isherwood, was a pacifist, a conscientious objector to forced military service, an expatriate, and a devotee of eastern religions, of Vedanta particularly. Alan Watts listed Isherwood in that group of World War II immigrants to America whom he called the British Mystical Expatriates, to include Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Felix Greene. And with this, as Alex read still more about Isherwood, came the whole bunch, Swami Prabhavananda, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Brahmananda, and J. Krishnamurti, to join the others he knew about already, theosophists Blavatsky, Besant, Olcott, Judge, Leadbeater, and Buddhist scholar-devotees Suzuki, Humphreys, Evans-Wentz, and David-Neel, individuals he henceforth referred to as his spiritual family. He was where he belonged in a huge way now.

Raja Yoga intrigued him again, and so he resumed all the techniques and meditation exercises as before but with a confidence and faith this time that it was important to his further development spiritually. His first experience with samadhi, a euphoria which he called “drunk on God,” came soon after. Saying it was God he was drunk on, though, was presumptuous of him. The fact was he didn’t know exactly what it was he was drunk on, except that it was spiritual. He was excited by it but at the same time uneasy, for this was someplace he had never been before. Underscoring this was what happened during a particularly intense meditation session later that month. Surrendering all that he was to whatever it was he was in contact with, the ground shook. Tibetan Buddhists, indeed the Buddha himself, experienced this all the time, he went on to learn, but it was of little consolation to his nerves.

And then there was that friend of his, a casualty of the Vietnam War. While researching a book he was writing about his own resistance to the war, he read letters of this former friend at the West Virginia and Regional Historical Archives at West Virginia University. So deeply engrossed in his words was he, to the point where he felt actually in touch with him somehow, suddenly a thunderstorm came roaring down the valley, shaking all the windows and blinds and blinking the lights. Concluding that it was just a coincidence, just any summer thunderstorm, he left it at that. The next morning, however, he found a full article about his friend, with his picture, on the front page of the local newspaper. What were the odds of it all these years later?

It all came to a head soon after. He had settled on the strict Buddhist position that he was living on a rock huddling blindly through space, a rock on which, by a fluke, there were life forms. Neither the rock nor anything on it was significant, though. The purpose of this view, stark as it was, he understood perfectly well. It was to discourage the grasping onto the lifeline of the supernatural, something that took the responsibility for human behavior and fate out of the hands of the individual and put it squarely into the hands of a God. Buddhists held, in other words, that what happened to them was their own doing and not the doing of something "out there." "Seek out your own salvation with diligence," the Buddha said. If a person was suffering he could and should fix it himself. Alex appreciated this. Over time, though, he found that it wore him down, made him feel old and dying on the vine, so to speak. Finally one evening during his walking meditation, he came crashing down.

Nature hated a vacuum, it was said, and Alex was a vacuum now. Into him then something suddenly flooded. The last time he felt it was years earlier when he regularly visited the local arboretum. On a long stretch of the main trail, there were two ancient coastal oak trees side by side, and always he would stop beside them and meditate. What the energy was that they radiated, he did not know, anymore than he knew how he was able to feel it. It felt as if it were the energy of the universe itself. In this moment of his collapse then, it was this power of the whole universe that rushed into him.

The next morning he set about putting up his Christmas tree, being the beginning of the holiday season. Up went all the glowing lights, the ornaments colorful and shiny, and tinsel even, twinkling cheerfully. It was all up in two hours except that he turned around and took it all down again. It so happened that his crisis of the evening before triggered in him a shift of consciousness so that his usual self, the one who put up Christmas trees every year, was now gone. In religion it was called dying to oneself. What was left, the energy of all that existed, was what he now identified with. He was a changed man.