I suggest you stop whatever you were doing and immediately order a copy of The
99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus,
Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures by Eliezer Sobel.
It
was recommended to me two people whose discerning judgment I trust
implicitly -- and usually end up agreeing with, once I've checked it
against my own discerning judgment -- the extraordinary spiritual
therapists Robert Augustus Masters and Diane Bardwell Masters.
I read the prologue of the book just now and it made me literally Laugh Out Loud at least four times. It is posted on the 99th Monkey website, where -- among other fun-filled adventures -- you can BUY THE BOOK).
I'll also post the prologue at the end of this message (feel free to
forward this message or repost it elsewhere to help other discerning
primates discover this great book).
In a very cool development Eliezer joined a thread discussing his book on an integral forum I moderate based on the work of Robert Augustus Masters.
So if there's anything you'd like to say to the author of the 99th
Monkey, that would be a great place to do it. Also note that Eliezer is
now in the midst of a book tour, so you may have an opportunity to meet him in person. (Diane didn't let us know about all this until just after he had done several dates close to where my wife Liz and I live, much to our dismay.)
OK, here is the witty and wise Prologue to The
99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus,
Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures by Eliezer Sobel:
~~~
Prologue
There was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys--the
irrepressible macaca fuscata--living on the island of Koshima in 1952;
incidentally the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with
sweet potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally
seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain unpleasant
grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo discovered
that if she took her potato down to the water’s edge, she could rinse
off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier meal. Imo taught her mother
and playmates the trick, and gradually, over the course of six years,
one monkey after another adopted the practice.
Then in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing
monkeys reached what is called a "critical mass," and suddenly, not
only did the entire monkey population on Koshima Island start
performing the new procedure, but all of the monkey populations on
neighboring islands spontaneously began washing their potatoes as well!
"The Hundredth Monkey" became the name futurists used for this unusual
phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey-experience to show that
this is also the way the human community makes dramatic, collective
paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking, being and behaving. Once a
critical mass of people have transformed their essentially materialist
world-view to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of
the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride. The
dirty sweet potato of being a self-centered, acquisitive, power-hungry
creature, blindly bent on the destruction of life as we know it, will
be gently washed in the stream of loving-kindness, peacefulness and the
desire to serve God and humanity, ushering in a Golden Age of peace and
prosperity for all people.
**
Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey.
If you don't get me, you don't get your critical mass, and it screws up
the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great
Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age through my simply continuing to be a
resistant little putz most of the time. My apologies.
(If it makes you feel any better, I recently heard somewhere that this
whole story about the monkeys and the potatoes is not true, that it
didn't really happen that way at all. That really annoyed me,
considering that I’d just based a whole book on it.)
***
I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I
was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est training in
Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half
years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desperately
trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue
for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet
shamans, healers and gurus, stay in ashrams and monasteries, sit for
long hours on meditation cushions, chant in foreign tongues, and live
up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat.
I
experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient spiritual
techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged, shiatsu-ed, and
rolfed, took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential
seminars, and self-improvement courses, sat with psychics, channels and
tarot readers, experienced Primal, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object
Relations, generic talk therapies and anti-depressants. And that’s the
short list. (The complete one gets embarrassing. Suffice it to say
that it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality
weekend—you don’t want to know--as well as having an obese female
therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could re-experience
being smothered by my mother.)
As Editor-in-Chief of
the New Sun Magazine in the ‘70s and the Wild Heart Journal more
recently, and through being a freelance spiritual journalist, it has
often been my job to do all these things. Like a scout sent ahead to
report back, I often saved others a lot of time: “You don’t have to go
deep into Brazil to do all-night rituals involving the ingestion of
ayahuasca, chanting in Portuguese to Oxum, the Mother of the Waters,
and throwing up out of a church window at four in the morning—I already
did that.”
Most stories like this end with an
epiphany: the seeker finds what he or she was looking for, writes a
book about it to inspire others, and then with any luck, appears on
Oprah and becomes very wealthy. Unfortunately, in my story, I remain
more or less the same guy—or as my friend Eddie Greenberg would say,
the “same old schmuck”--at the end as I was at the beginning.
An earlier version of this book was turned down by one publisher, who
said, “The main character’s story just doesn’t seem to hang together.”
Buh-buh-buh-but, I thought: This is a memoir; this is autobiographical…I AM the main character!
But he was right. My story doesn’t hang together. Whose does, really?
Nothing bugs me more than those self-help authors who start out as a
complete mess, find a magic solution, and then try to sell the rest of
us on a new and improved way to live, while getting very rich in the
process. At least this much I can promise you: apart from a few laughs
and some good stories, this book will very definitely not change your
life. Fortunately, every bona fide spiritual teacher worth their salt
will remind you again and again that you don’t need to change your life
in order to get enlightened, find God, or be your Self.
Again and again, we seekers of truth are told that our primordial,
essential nature is always already the case, always and only available
now, no matter what the circumstances of our inner or outer lives, and
therefore all desire to change our inner or outer lives in order to
somehow get closer to the ever-elusive spiritual prize are not only
fruitless, but are actually the problem itself. Seeking truth or God
or enlightenment or Buddha nature is the equivalent, it has often been
said, of a fish swimming endlessly in search of water. Once our great
quest has commenced, we have already missed the point and are on the
wrong track.
***
Had I only known
***
I recently read Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Illych," because
in dramatic contrast to War and Peace, it is very short. The story
invites contemplation of perhaps the worst accusation of all: a life
lived wrong. But Ivan doesn't get it until he's lying on his death
bed. You and I still have time, although not a whole lot, really. Which
is why I generally never read memoirs or biographies. Who can afford to
spend their time reading about someone else's life?
Nor do I presume that you should spend your time reading about my life.
Unless, of course, it's funny. And ask anybody: I'm usually a pretty
funny guy, apart from those times when I’m lamenting the fact that,
like Ivan Illych, I may have lived my entire life completely
incorrectly and now it’s too late to make it right. It isn’t too late,
of course, given that another thing the sages often like to chuckle
about is that enlightenment is “only a thought away,” or that God is
“closer to us than our own breath.” Nevertheless, we all know time is
short, and so it’s good to always keep in mind what the famous Tibetan
Yogi Milarepa once said:
"You people who gather here
think that death will
come sauntering over to you.
NO!
Whenever death comes,
it strikes like lightning."
I got caught in a riptide in the Outer Banks of North Carolina a few
summers ago, and didn’t know that the trick is to swim parallel to
shore, as opposed to panicking and thrashing about wildly and coming
extremely close to drowning. Close enough to get a glimpse of the
shocking recognition, “Oh my God, I’m actually drowning, this is it. I
can’t believe I’m dying today.” Milarepa was right: it did feel like
lightning, coming out of nowhere when I least expected it. There are
lots of stories about people who emerge from such experiences with a
renewed sense of aliveness and appreciation, and begin living with more
passion and making major lifestyle changes and so on. Leave it to me
to be the one guy who manages to blow a near-death experience and
just carry on as if nothing much happened.
Be that as
it may, if you're going to take the time to read a book, it ought to,
at the very least, have an impact. Father William McNamara, a Carmelite
monk, once said: "Never read good books. There's no time for that.
Only read great ones."
Or funny ones.
***
Books that impacted my life in my early 20s:
1) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The day I finished The Fountainhead,
I dropped out of the music department at Northwestern University,
having decided to be an architect like Howard Roark, the hero of the
book. However, I then discovered that Northwestern didn't have an
architecture department, so I enrolled in the closest thing to it,
Interior Art and Design. I went to the first day of classes where we
were asked to make little couches out of construction paper, and I
dropped out of college completely. And thus began the sequence of
adventures recounted in this book.
2) Most
everything by Jack Kerouac, particularly The Town and the City and
Desolation Angels. He stirred the passionate, poignant, prose-poet in
me, the vagabond artist-seeker, albeit with a credit card, very
generous parents, and a suburban, upper middleclass Jewish sensibility.
In other words, I was absolutely nothing like Kerouac.
3) The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. Like a million other people, I
thought the book was about me. Someone finally gave me a label I could
get behind. And while I still romantically fancy myself an “outsider,”
it could also be argued that I simply do not like to work and with one
exception, have never had a real job in the world for longer than about
nine months.
The true Outsider, Wilson explains, is
someone who has somehow intuited or glimpsed the vast, empty, infinite
possibility of eternal life and spirit, but is now somehow separate
from that experience except as a nagging memory, and their life is
fueled by the intense and obsessive desire to "get it back." Their art
and their religious life become an expression of that quest for
authenticity and essence.
The most difficult part
for outsiders, Wilson says, is the realization that although as humans
they have been given the most extraordinary and abundant gifts and an
infinitely mysterious and magical existence filled with beauty and
love, they seem to be ironically lacking only one thing: the simple
ability to appreciate and enjoy any of it. Ahab said it like this:
"This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me,
since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the
low enjoying power; damned in the midst of Paradise!"
I hate that “ne’er enjoy” part. And considered in that light, I truly
am an outsider. I once interviewed Colin Wilson via e-mail for the
Wild Heart Journal. Here is our conversation, verbatim:
Me: Please elaborate on the connection between the artist's impulse
toward creativity and expression and the religious person's yearning
for spiritual freedom or union.
Colin: Ooof! I
don't feel like writing you an essay to answer that question. Norman
Mailer once said to me that he got fed up with people who, after a
lecture, asked ten-cent questions that required ten-dollar answers, and
this is an example. I just don't have time to write you pages and
pages on religion and creativity. Ask more down to earth questions,
like how old are you, have you ever had syphilis, etc. and I'll
answer. (The answer to those is 67 and no.)
It was
a very short interview. (And FYI, that conversation was about seven
years ago, so Wilson would be 74 now, and hopefully, still free of
STDs.)
***
Jewish people in America and
elsewhere are almost always given two names at birth--one in their
native language, and one in Hebrew. My English name is Elliot, and I
used it most of my life. Eliezer is my Hebrew name. It’s pronounced
eh-lee-eh—(as in bed)—zer. Rhymes with Nebuchadnezzer, the infamous
Babylonian king. "Eli" means God and "ezer" means help, so Eliezer
means "God is my help." I was upset that all of my friends on a
spiritual path had been given new spiritual names by their teachers at
some point, to help them shift their primary identities away from their
limited personalities over to their True Nature. Most of the names
were Hindu, like Krishna, Arjuna, Ananda, and so on. Generally the
names meant something along the lines of "Blissful Consciousness," and
it was thought that even if you were totally miserable and depressed,
your spiritual name would help you remember that your real Self was
nevertheless still having a gay old time of it.
Interestingly, in Judaism, one of the last-ditch methods for healing
someone is to change their name, thus tricking God, who might otherwise
have had their name inscribed in the "Sayanara Sucker" column of the
Book of Life. I once took a workshop in which we were asked to take on
a new name just for the weekend. People chose names like "Fun,"
"Gentle Being," and "Millionairress," trying to cultivate specific,
desired qualities. I became Crescent Jewel. My friend Eddie chose
the name "Jim."
By the way, ordinarily Jews write
the word God as G-d, never spelling it out on paper. This avoids the
possibility of being suddenly burdened by a piece of paper that is
considered sacred because it contains the Holy Name, and which you
therefore can never throw away; but since you don’t really want this
scrap of paper, you wind up with a box of them in the attic. What’s
more, if we avoid spelling out “God” and the document in question does
get thrown away, we’ve only thrown out a hyphenated word, and not the
actual name of God. Predicated on the prior assumption, I guess, that
if we did spell it out and the paper got thrown away, it would be akin
to trashing our G-d, the presumably Untrashable One.
***
There's a great definition of heaven and hell I read somewhere: after
death, you are shown a film of your life as you lived it, as well as a
film of your life as you could have lived it, given your highest
possibilities and potential. The closer the two films match, the closer
you are to heaven. The greater the distance, the more hellish. I'm
shown those two films everyday in my own mind. And I'm trapped in the
theater, like some surreal cinema in The Twilight Zone that only shows
the same two movies for all Eternity. At least they're both comedies.
***
The morning dew flees away
Is no more
What remains
in this world of ours?
--Ikkyu
I've always been interested in reading the enigmatic dying
words of great people--particularly Zen masters. My favorite was
Suzuki Roshi, whose last words to those assembled at his deathbed were
simply, "I don't want to die." There was no hidden meaning, which is
the essence of Zen.
Allen Ginsberg, who spent his life
writing so many meaningful words and wonderful lines of poetry,
apparently ended his life with only one word. But it was a great word,
one of his best ever: "Tootles." (It's possible I'm completely
misinformed about this, but I like the story whether it's true or not.)
Timothy Leary's last words were "Why not?" And his last words to
William Burroughs were, "I hope someday I'm as funny as you."
My friend Karen's father was shoveling snow when his wife came out on
the porch, screaming, "STOP SHOVELING, OR YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE A HEART
ATTACK!" to which he responded, "IF I HAVE A HEART ATTACK, IT'S GOING
TO BE FROM YOU SCREAMING AT ME!" Then he dropped dead.
A friend of mine was standing around having a conversation with a 55ish
male acquaintance, and in the middle of a sentence he too just dropped
to the ground, dead. His last words, my friend told me, were “Hey, it
was good seeing you.”
Finally, they say that Gandhi
was such an evolved devotee of the Lord that at the moment of his
death--when he was shot--he had the presence of mind to utter his
sacred mantra, one of the Hindu names for God: "Ram." But when they
depicted this in the film, it was in English, and came across more like
the way it probably happened: when Gandhi was shot in the film, he
said, "Oh God," which is more or less what any ordinary shlub like you
or me would say if we were shot.
**
I was an
interfaith, non-denominational hospital chaplain some years ago. My
colleagues in the hospital were a Presbyterian reverend, a Mennonite
minister, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor—(I never learned the
difference between a minister, a reverend and a pastor)--an
Episcopalian seminarian, and an Apostles of Christ Holy Roller
Pentacostalist. Plus, a Methodist, a Baptist and a minister of the
United Church of Christ. The hospital was in the Bible Belt; all the
patients were Christians, meaning they were followers of the teachings
of Jesus Christ, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Christ, as described in the
New Testament. As a Jewish Buddhist Sufi New Age pot-smoking aging
hippie, it wasn't exactly a perfect fit for me.
(Although I secretly believe Jesus Christ was also a Jewish Buddhist
Sufi New Age hippie, albeit probably without the use of pot. Although
some claim he spent a lot of time in India before starting his Son of
Man career, and if that's true, then he easily might have smoked some
hashish chillums with the local Shiva babas--what young guy backpacking
through India on a spiritual quest wouldn't ?)
Milarepa’s “lightning of death” struck the people I ministered to in
the hospital all the time. But in that situation nobody ever had the
opportunity to say their last words, because they were always on
morphine, fentenol, and various other medications, which allowed them
to remain unconscious and without pain as they made their passage to
the Great Beyond. When I saw this again and again, I quickly made out
a living will in which I asked that I not be sedated at the time of
death, that I'd rather be awake, even if in pain, so I could at least
come up with some pithy, enigmatic last words. My wife Shari laughed
when she heard this, pointing out that I tend to take five Advil for
the slightest headache, so intolerant am I of enduring pain of any
sort.
But what a disappointment it would be if, in
addition to whatever else was causing me to be on my deathbed, I also
suffered from writer's block, just when it was time for my last words.
As a writer, if I am to take death seriously, I must always remain
aware that these may very well be my last words.
~~~
Cool, huh? I particularly like this part:
As
Editor-in-Chief of the New Sun Magazine in the ‘70s and the Wild Heart
Journal more recently, and through being a freelance spiritual
journalist, it has often been my job to do all these things. Like a
scout sent ahead to report back, I often saved others a lot of time:
“You don’t have to go deep into Brazil to do all-night rituals
involving the ingestion of ayahuasca, chanting in Portuguese to Oxum,
the Mother of the Waters, and throwing up out of a church window at
four in the morning—I already did that.”
It reminds me of when I read Robert Augustus Master' amazing book Darkness Shining Wild and thought, "Robert went through a soul-wrenching spiritual breakthrough / psychotic breakdown so that I don't have to!" Except in the case of Eliezer's book I didn't get the memo on Ayahuasca before I had my own (harrowing but growth-promoting) adventures with the "Vine with a Soul"
in Peru. D'oh! So I figure I'd better read this book and find out about
his other spiritual (mis)adventures so I can make a more informed
choice about whether or not to replicate the same stupid mistakes...
- Eliezer Sobol, The
99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus,
Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Adventures
~~~
Again, here is the link to buy The 99th Monkey. You'll be glad you did. :)
spiral out,
Arthur
I am seeking meaningful work.
bio: http://aqalicious.gaia.com/
I spend most of my "forum time" these days on The Integral Pod: http://pods.gaia.com/ii/
"You've never seen everything." - Bruce Cockburn