But nonviolence, above all, was the mission I felt I had been given by—for lack of a better word—god. In retrospect I can see that this savasana and precept practice was a lazy man’s zen, but nevertheless it comforted me and from it I do feel I received much benefit. Eventually, however, in the ninth year of this practice my discipline weakened—I don’t know why—until by the end my meditation was no more than my token assumption of the corpse pose and the mudra for only a few minutes and then even that, too, dwindled to nothing. Part of the decline was the influence of Krishnamurti, whose books I had come to love.

Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity—such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

Yet another part was my job. I had always been a dedicated educator. Now my daily classroom teaching, because it seemed to demand of me such vigilance, had begun to feel more and more like a religious practice.

A third factor was that I had begun what is called power walking—the word “power” a misnomer in my case—for exercise but also as meditation. In the summer of 1985 I replaced my nightly savasana meditation with this daily exercise, a fast walk of five miles either on the sidewalks of my neighborhood or around the track of the local high school.

I had gotten fat.

As I walked I followed my breath and watched my step, trying to maintain balance and rhythm. Often I also introduced mantras as I walked. The word “peace” was the one I most often repeated in my head, turning it into a word of two syllables, the first on the inhalation, the second on the exhalation. Despite my intention, on some days I walked ten or twelve city blocks and had already worked up a sweat before I remembered the word “peace”; on other days it was the word in my mind my first step out my front door; but it was never long before my discursive thinking—usually on job, marriage, and family—would arise to displace it; and I might walk a mile or two before I would remember the word I had vowed and determined to maintain in my mind with my breath.

My commitment to this walking meditation was much more difficult than lying on my back and following my breath before sleep. Winter weather was a big obstacle and deterrent and—counting also my getting ready, my cooling down, and my cleaning up—my five-mile walk demanded two hours of my time every day. More than once I skipped this exercise for months, twice even for nine months, yet over the next twenty years my walking meditation was a regular part of my life.

I must praise it.

Walk.

Sometime in the mid-1990s I read books by Thich Nhat Hanh in which he recommended returning often to our breath and making what he called a half smile in our normal daily activity, and he recommended using common sounds and sights—red lights, green lights, bird calls, clouds, sirens, horns, bumps and scratches, blood, running water, thunder, lightning, rain, insects, babies, yawns—as reminders to do so.

This wonderful practice I immediately adopted and dozens of times each day, some days perhaps hundreds of times, I remembered my breath—as I had learned from Thich Nhat Hanh—and I would bring my attention to my inhalation and exhalation and smile what I imagined to be half.

It felt like a way of remembering life. It felt like a way of remembering death. It felt like a way of remembering life and death and to do no harm, to do good, to serve all beings, and to honor the precepts I still recited to myself every morning when I awoke.

My habit still was to look everyone with whom I spoke in the eye. To do so had always come natural to me and after the reinforcement that I’d received in 1972 from John I now did it without thinking. To many the practice is disconcerting, I was often reminded, just as it had at one time been to me.

“Why are you looking at me?” I am sometimes asked.

“I’m sorry!” I stammer and shrug. “I was just—looking.”

Though I suspect it was invisible to everyone but me myself, my experience in 1975 had changed me to the core. From age twelve to age thirty-two I wanted to be cool.

Now I wanted to be good.

Though I didn’t call it religion, I thought about what others call the religious life every day. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about it and about my effort to practice it. From 1975 until 1985 I often considered moving to The Farm in order to work with my friend John. Each time my wife and I would wrestle over money and jobs I revisited the possibility.

For eight years we were vegetarians.

We gave up vegetarianism only when our children insisted upon a diet like that of their friends. In my private heart of hearts in 1975 I had also taken a vow of poverty and I imagined myself—idealized myself—some day dying as I read Gandhi had, with no possessions other than my two changes of simple clothing, my eyeglasses, my sandals, and my cup and bowl. My wife and I rented an apartment and then a house and for eight years we lived from paycheck to paycheck.

But finally in 1985 my wife convinced me—thank god—that if only for the sake of our children and in the interest of common sense we had to buy a house. I agonized over what I considered a breach of my vow, it was indeed a bitter pill for me to swallow, but in the end I had to concede that my wife was right. Given our situation my principle—or the way I was trying to live it—didn’t make sense. For two years we had paid almost as much in rent each month as we would eventually pay to own our own home.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

I’d never felt so low.

Once I realized how foolish I had been in labeling my year in heaven my enlightenment I hardly spoke of it to anyone ever again—with the single exception of my new friend, my former student, artist and poet Marc Magisana—unless perhaps obliquely by a word or two just in passing. Basically I just kept quiet about it until 1984 when it all tumbled out into the novel I wrote in that single summer but could not publish.

Thanks to my experience of whatever it was my faith in the dharma was adamant, my diamond beyond any doubt, but I was high no more.

Married a second time and in 1984 struggling with seven-year-old twins and practicing the dharma as best I could on my own, so far as I knew I had neither freed nor saved even one sentient being nor in spite of my having incorporated the principles of personal honesty and nonviolence into my classroom teaching had I any effect on the killing and war and threats of war still featured daily in the morning newspaper and on the evening newscast on TV.

But though I was discouraged I wasn’t depressed, and I had the summer off to write, and once I turned the handle and opened the faucet out it poured—my experience, my enlightenment—indifferent to embarrassment, to absurdity, to scorn, to ridicule, to humiliation, to contempt, to mockery, to taboo, and to shame, even in fact defiant.

Like Allen Ginsberg, I wanted to howl.

But by then my enlightenment—whatever it had been—was long since over and my novel was less an account of my year in heaven than a description of my present life in hell.

I called it The Archeobiopsy de Marnk Twang.

Nobody cared.

For twenty years I maintained a daily routine. Though I often called myself a Buddhist, I had no teacher other than my two friends John and Billy—by mail and later by email—and the writers whose books I was constantly reading.

Neither did I sit.

From 1977 to 1984 each night when I went to bed before I fell asleep I lay flat on my back—no pillow under my head—either in bed or on the floor. I closed my eyes, spread my legs slightly, my feet eighteen inches apart, my arms a foot away from my body, my palms up, the tips of my thumb and index finger of each hand meeting lightly in a mudra, the gyan, and I followed my breath.

I did this until my breath slowed and my mind was calm.

On some nights I lay on my back following my breath for only ten minutes; on other nights—when my mind wrestled in turmoil over my marriage or my job or both—I might lie in bed following my breath for an hour or more. The longest I ever lay on my back in this meditation was three hours.

In addition to the dozens of dharma books I read constantly—on spirituality and religion of all kinds, on meditation techniques, and on yoga—to try to figure out what had happened to me and what I had experienced I also read books about World War 2 and the Holocaust.

In one of the dharma books I learned of savasana, the corpse or dead body pose for relaxation, and this was the pose I had adopted for my nightly meditation. It seemed the simplest and its simplicity and its name seemed to suit me both because of my beginner’s idea of Zen and because of my obsession with world war and the industrial killing and death resulting from war.

This nightly ritual—usually for from ten minutes to an hour depending how long it took for me to calm myself—I continued without missing a single night for nine years.

Though I tried to be aware my meditating with my eyes closed meant that I sometimes—perhaps often, I’m not sure—dozed off and fell asleep. I knew because when I woke my thumb and finger tips had slipped from their mudra and no longer touched. When this happened I either resumed my meditation or just rolled over and went to sleep.

In addition to meditating on my back each night I also used meditation at other times when I felt especially stressed. Not long ago I read an essay in which the author stated that this is exactly the wrong way to use zazen but it worked wonders for me. Each morning when I awoke the first thing I did was remind myself of the precepts I believed I had learned from my religious experience—no killing, no lying, no attachment.

Let go and be kind.

Each night when I assumed my corpse pose I practiced dying. I practiced giving up everything, surrendering so that—just as in the Christian prayer I had learned and recited every night as a child—if I should die before I woke I could surrender to death totally and accept it and so that if I should wake I could start fresh and new from zero and do my best again each day to teach nonviolence and peace, generosity, honesty, truth, compassion, and kindness. I hasten to add that I know my even saying this sounds not only immodest but ridiculous.

They were just words.

Still in my own silly way promise and practice I did. Thanks to the magnitude of my subjective, private, yet precious experience, with regard to virtue I was from that time forward never again a cynic.

Never!

My wife Ruth took a job teaching English to junior high students in Woodbine, Iowa, and we agreed that I would stay home and care for our twins. My oldest daughter, who was then living with us, moved to Woodbine with us, too, and there completed her senior year of high school. For Ruth, teaching junior high English was torture. One night early in December she woke me from a sound sleep at 3:00 in the morning because, she said, she had something she had to tell me and it couldn’t wait.

“I’ve lost my faith in god,” she said.

Hmm.

The next night almost the very same thing—

“I don’t want to wake up anymore.”

Hmm.

In the morning my wife and I agreed that I should find a job so she could quit hers and do something else. I read the ads in the Sunday World-Herald and applied for four—ombudsman for an Indian reservation in South Dakota, deputy director for city development in my home town of Shenandoah, counselor in a halfway house for troubled teenagers in Ames where I had earned my bachelor’s degree fifteen years earlier, and instructor of English at the west campus of a nearby community college. I was invited to interview for all four positions. At the conclusion of the second interview I was offered the job on the spot. On January 2 of 1980 I began teaching English in Omaha.

Whew—

Not so fast!

I’d arrived just as the annual evaluations of faculty by their supervisors—and supervisors by their superiors—were taking place. My new colleagues tried immediately to enlist me in their causes. In confidence I was told by four or five different colleagues whom they believed ought to be fired and whom not.

“Marcella ought to be fired,” Grace told me.

“Grace is burned out—all used up,” Marcella told me. “She ought to be fired.”

“Fish ought to be fired,” Julie told me.

Fish was my new boss, the man who had just hired me, the supervisor of developmental studies and the only person of color at the west campus of the college. Though I had been on the job for only three weeks an annual evaluation of me was required nevertheless so to the office of Mr. Fish I reported as appointed. Fish was encouraging and friendly and our conversation was both informal and brief. At its conclusion he asked me if I had encountered any problems in my new position so far.

Fool that I was—trying still as best I could to be honest and to tell the truth all the time—I told my supervisor that I was troubled, uncomfortable, and confused by the ugly academic politics in the office.

Grace thinks Marcella should be fired, I explained, Marcella thinks Grace should be fired and, I added, neither Grace nor Marcella seems to approve of the job that Julie is doing. I didn’t even really know these people. I had just met them. To me they all seemed normal, cooperative, competent.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Julie has had a few problems,” Fish responded.

“Julie thinks you should be fired!” I laughed—at the absurdity of it all.

Fish smiled and shrugged.

A week later Julie met with Mr. Fish for her own annual evaluation. They conferred in his office for over an hour and when Julie finally emerged she was furious, livid, cursing under her breath, and as she strode through our common office area she made a beeline straight for my desk.

“Did you tell Fish I thought he should be fired?” she demanded.

“No,” I lied.

It was the first outright lie I had told in five years.

My twins were only two years old, my oldest daughter was living with me and Ruth, I was still paying child support each month for my oldest son, who lived with his mother and her husband in Shenandoah, and my wife Ruth, totally exhausted by her job in junior high, planned to quit in May. I needed my new job. I felt desperate.

Trapped.

It was two months before I could bring myself to confess to Julie that indeed I had told Fish what she had told me. I apologized and started to explain.

Julie interrupted me.

“Forget it,” she said.

She simply dismissed the matter with a wave and never mentioned it again—for which I was much relieved and still feel grateful. It had been a much bigger matter to me than it had been to Julie.

Because of our study and practice of religion for two years together in Fayette, I felt obliged to tell my friends Paul, Billy, and John of this incident. Each reacted to it in the same way.

“Pressure.”

They understood.  

Rarely did I speak of my vow to be honest. On one occasion my three nephews inquired about the religious experience to which I and others in the family sometimes alluded. I told some stories and boasted of my years of honesty. After my brother and his three teenage sons had gone home my wife corrected me.

“You smoked pot for years,” she said. “That was a lie.”

Yes.

From many people I’d kept that secret for a long time and I had not quit completely until five months after my first grandchild had been born. I told my nephews what Ruth had said the next time I saw them.

Once I realized how foolish I had been in labeling my year in heaven my enlightenment I hardly spoke of it again ever except perhaps obliquely by a word or two just in passing.

Basically I just kept quiet about it.

What is all this? Where did it all come from? Where is it all going?

Some people need an ultimate "origin."

Not all do.

Buddhists, for example, speak of a "beginningless beginning."

But people who require an ultimate origin just simply posit one; the convention is to call this origin or creator "god."

I don't mind. "Origin" equals "creator" equals "god."

Got it.

But, logicians say, then we have the problem of the origin of god.

What existed before god? Who "created" god? Then who or what created the "creator" of god? And who the creator before that?

Now we have begun the infinite regress, a concept not so different from a beginningless beginning.

Scientists, too, are stymied.

The "big bang" origin? Okay, and before the big bang? Before that? And before that?

Here we go again!

So far as I know, no one—not theist, not scientist, not atheist—denies the existence of the vast mysterious power that sustains this whole mind-boggling reality we experience from microscopic insect to big night sky spangled with twinkling stars.

But what on earth is all this—the horror, the beauty, the pain, the love?

Atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and scientists just leave it at that—a mystery, an unknown—while they experiment and explore to learn more.

Theists, religious believers, depending on their specific era, culture, and religion, prefer the parables and poems that scholars call "myths," the tales ancient peoples told to explain the mystery and the unknown.

They're interesting and beautiful; but personally I think it best not to insist on the absolute "truth" of any one of them.

None of them can really bear serious scrutiny.

"What is life all about?" the late Kurt Vonnegut asked his son.

"Father," his son replied, "we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

You Christians certainly have a complicated religion! So many words! My goodness! I'm just not smart enough to make sense of all that. The Jews and Moslems and Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Baha'is and Socratics and Taoists and Confucians and Wiccans and Mormons and Rastafarians and Deists all have complex religions, too, and their holy books test my credence just as yours does. I'm slowly making my way through them, though, a little at a time, thinking and comparing them all, trying to understand all these different gods and rules and terms and claims and stuff. While I read and think and study I'm hoping that I don't find myself in a situation where I have to kill somebody before I die—in this torture-torn and war-tormented vast confusing sea—and that I can be kind to the people I meet along the way and maybe share with them a meal and a laugh and a hug, ordinary earthly joys more than heaven enough for a simple little old man like me.