Musings on My Mentor
My mentor taught me very little.
He was a large man, bearded, broad-shouldered, in his fifties when I knew him. Everywhere he went, he brought a large black tactical backpack, with his files, his gear, emergency first aid supplies, a Moleskine, an expensive fountain pen with fine Japanese ink, and a Glock 19. His favorite outfit was a black shirt and a black Utili-kilt. In the winter, he drove an old Ford truck from the 1970s that he maintained himself. In the summer, he rode his Harley Davidson.
At our first meeting, he told me I needed to keep a journal, and that I needed to meditate for at least sixteen minutes per day, every day. When I asked him how to meditate, he said, I can’t tell you. When I told him I was having a hard time getting myself to meditate, he sent me to a 5 am za-zen service at the local temple. When I asked him how to tell whether or not I was meditating, he shrugged and laughed.
If I asked questions about mundane details, he would start a metaphysical conversation. When I asked questions about metaphysics, he would discourse on mundane details. He never let me pin him down. He never let me pin anything down. As soon as I acquired an understanding of something, he picked it out of my pocket.
He believed that every human being contains the entirety of the human experience within them, and that I already had the answers. I could count on my intuition and faculties to guide me, as long as I acknowledged that life was in charge and that I had no business interfering.
He would encourage me to explore, help me see things for myself, confront me with the truth when I was unwilling to do it myself. He would also discourage, but by no means attempt to disallow, my brushes with distraction, dead ends and danger.
A doctor of clinical psychology and a lifelong martial artist, he practiced radical nonjudgment, radical inter-individuality, radical non-doing. Prior to doctoral training, he studied literature and writing at the University of Montana. He had been a student of Bob Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and later apprenticed with Aaron Beck at the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
As a therapist, he specialized in the management and treatment of borderline personality disorder, among the most hellish of all psychological afflictions, and the most difficult to work with. His clients were primarily sex workers, veterans and people who walked through life with a spiritual limp, having been hobbled by severe abuse, molestation and injury in childhood. He was my therapist, for a short time, until I told him I wanted to quit that, and seek enlightenment instead. I remember asking if he could help me. He said, “I don’t know.” But he was grinning.
I don’t think he thought of himself as a teacher as much as he thought of himself as a Catcher in the Rye. He was there for the people who got too near the edge of the cliff.
He mostly held to his policy of non-interference. Occasionally, if I said or did something he thought was unskillful, he would frown in a big, dramatic way that I could tell was affected, but nevertheless landed on my heart like a tree felled by snow. He laughed a lot, but more often, he was quiet. He could ward off an unproductive line of inquiry by just slightly, quizzically cocking his head. He had this infuriating way of giving you a side-eye and smiling, like, “come on, man.” He could simultaneously be condescending, galvanizing, intimidating and emboldening.
There were, of course, many tradeoffs to his educational style. I lacked scaffolding to understand much of what he was doing, especially early on, so I could rarely get a handle on my own inner transformation. The first year or so I spent crawling out of my character armor was relatively straightforward. But the process of “seeking” “enlightenment” - what I would come to understand as the infinite game of skillful engagement with the present moment, perpetually growing in one’s humanity, and the capacity to handle the truth - now that was a bewildering experience. I remember those years as a freefalling, out of the hollow certainties of grand narratives into a raucous, frightening, often hilarious groundlessness.
There were times he went to great lengths to recognize and affirm my imperfection and vulnerability, to address the deluded shame and guilt that I felt over minor transgressions and poorly resolved dilemmas. In these times, wisdom, healing and spiritual strength would flow into the space opened up by his interventions. There were others in which, upon reflection, I believe he allowed me to suffer totally unnecessarily. It seemed that he sometimes purposefully withheld mutuality and recognition, and purposefully confounded my attempts to feel whole. I was never able to descry a logic behind this. He was a strange man, loving and gentle, deeply compassionate, but only intermittently sympathetic. At times I felt like he saw and understood me at a depth that no other human being ever had before, not my own parents, not a lover, not even myself. At other times, he felt completely closed and separate, like he was as casually aware of (and disinterested in) me as the furniture in the room, or the traffic that slithered by outside the window.
In the seven years I worked with him, especially early on, I sometimes likened the feeling of working with him to being like a mouse speaking with a vegan cat. I knew he was not going to hurt me - not on purpose - but it was also clear that he could not, by his nature, resist toying with me. Just as the skillset of the warmonger is the skillset of the peacekeeper, the skillset of the manipulator is the skillset of the psychotherapist.
Perhaps this is why he was so distrustful of symbols, of words, of reifications. He was a master manipulator, even as he was a master truth-teller. I feel grateful and lucky that this man came to love the world for its own sake, and not for his own.
He warned me early on that our work would be full of paradox, and that I did not need to trust his words - I could see for myself whether or not they were true - but he did ask me to practice hope that if I didn’t understand something yet, one day I would.
He stressed non-doing, as well as the practice of mastery unto effortlessness. He believed in the simple superiority of nature, but obsessively collected knowledge of the mechanics of cognition and behavior. He maintained constant mindfulness while surrendering and re-surrendering, moment by moment, to the Dao.
He said, don’t go against the flow. If it’s not working for you, change the flow. And yet, he seemed to believe there was something fundamentally unmanageable about being human, like the skeleton we were born with wasn’t good enough, and needed to be broken and reset, bone by bone.
He rarely bothered to address the contradictions in his instructions, unless I became hostile about it (in which case, he became far more interested in me examining my hostility.) I was constantly frustrated. I often could not understand how he came to his conclusions, especially when he decided not to defend them, to simply ignore me and move on to another topic. I could never rationally square the unconditional self-love he insisted on with the painful ordeals, fasts, and long periods of solitude, celibacy and rigorous practice he prescribed. I couldn’t get a finger on why he condemned self-coercion in some arenas, and insisted on punishing, militaristic self-discipline in others. He would simply say, the context is different, almost pleading, like he was embarrassed for me, like it was something so obvious that he shouldn’t have to point it out.
With sometimes frightening intensity, he demanded stark, unyielding honesty from me, and called me out whenever I strayed a little from an exact, aligned connection with my true self. At other times, he casually glossed over his own hypocrisies with an elan that would have made Whitman blush. Sometimes I wonder if he had, in his own mind, gone beyond the need for intellectual justifications. If it were not for the copious notes that he took when we spoke, I would have thought he was guided solely by intuition.
My best explanation, these years later, is that he knew full well how confusing and inconstant he was, and had simply accepted his paradoxes and flaws as a berry bush accepts its thorns. He knew that with time and distance, the self-serving nature of my ego would shape the memory of our relationship into a durable superegoic structure, and that most of the emotional charge in my objections would drain out. What would remain in my mind was my own voice, in my own words, doing an impression of him bringing out the best in me.
He was right.
Of all my frustrations with my teacher, perhaps my most pointed was with his refusal to illuminate the mystical processes that were jarringly, often painfully transforming me. Out of one side of his mouth, he professed that any generalized reification of a spiritual principle was a betrayal of that principle. A novice kills Buddhas on the road. A master is one who has stopped putting them there in the first place.
But, out of the other side of his mouth, he validated, affirmed and encouraged the universal, as he perceived it, resonating in my particular experience. He believed it was there and could be articulated, but only by me, in my own words.
He believed the job of books, of scriptures, of speech, of representation of any kind, was to ultimately point to the insufficiency of representation. No book could convey what could be conveyed in mutual presence, in relationship, with shared breath, shared understanding, nervous co-regulation, subtle turns in tone of voice, the vast changes in meaning that can be affected by a twinkle in the eye.
I think he believed there was a time and place for people to live their lessons, and that we are not in charge of deciding those things. That was up to life, or Dharmakaya, or the Dao, or even God, if you don’t mind. When the divine wanted us to have an opportunity to learn something, it would become available to us, if we were able to notice it, to act skillfully on it, to integrate it. To reify an experiential lesson was an attempt to rush God. Writing or speaking about mysticism distorted it with cognitive frames and myriad unintended associations. To render an experience symbolically was to strip it of true understanding and create an illusory knowledge - one that made people believe concepts were more real than the life to which they pointed.
To my mentor, as to Thomas Aquinas, all that was written was straw. As is perhaps obvious, I disagree. I see his point, and often feel sympathetic to it, but he would hate that I just wrote that. He was well aware of my love of writing, of finding beautiful words with which to express my experience of the unspeakable. He tolerated that. But he wouldn’t want me to tolerate any inner conflict, or anything that prevented the instant, spontaneous expression of my present feelings.
He would want me to fight him on it, and to have faith that if I was correct, I would prevail. He would want me to win, if I could. If I did, it meant I had refined and improved on his method. It meant he had done his job.
The last time I saw him was in 2020. He told me the pandemic lockdowns were a gift. It was time, he said. There was nothing more for us to do together. He said I needed to leave secular life, go to the mountains in the desert, find solitude and sit there in strong determination meditation until I finished the work.
I was angry with him. It was the middle of a global disaster and I had householder duties. My son was only 15, and was struggling with identity issues, depression, the trauma of lost friends and a lost school environment. My family needed me. That my mentor was encouraging me to leave them felt profoundly unwise.
I remember he asked, why can’t your son just live with his Mom?
I cocked my head at him, slightly. My mentor had no children, no spouse. He lived alone. He had never been a father. But all of these years working with people who had been abused as children, all of these years helping people move past their developmental traumas, all of these years working to help heal the wounds inflicted on human beings by their parents. Did he really not understand what a father’s presence means to a child? Did he really not understand what I meant to my son?
Did he not know what he meant to me?
I didn’t answer his question. I said, “I’ll think about it. How do you think I should prepare?”
“Read The Dokkodo.” he said.
I don’t have the faith to challenge my mentor yet. I don’t yet have faith in my contribution to the lineage. But my son is now almost 18, almost ready for college, almost ready to be independent. It’s almost time. My mind drifts to thoughts of stark, hot days and deep red desert sunsets. I think about Bodidharma and Beck. I think about buying a motorcycle. Dokkodo is a short read. I’m thinking about making it a practice, committing it to memory.
When I get back from my solitude, I’m going to find my mentor, if he’s still around here. If he’s still alive. I’m going to tell him all the ways he’s wrong. I’ll tell him all the ways that writing is energy work, how it can heal and guide and orient and be an instrument in the hands of God without reifying, without confusing, without grounding people further in the misery of delusion. I’ll show him my work - the tweets, the memes, Vivid Void, the Almanac, the books I want to write, the courses I want to teach. I’ll tell him how much I resent him for not understanding, for counseling me to leave my family during a disaster, for being a heartless, thoughtless bastard. And I’ll tell him how much I love him, and how grateful I am for him. How much he changed my life, by refusing to change my life, for seven years.
Or maybe I won’t say any of those things. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, something that my time in the desert will illuminate for me, will shift or make real. Maybe there’s something I have yet to understand. I don’t know. I suppose I hope so.
Ahh, the path of the long, dusty road; how I Love you so.
Beautiful piece. Your mentor did well, my friend.