Psychiatrist: Well, why don’t you turn him in?

Man: I would, but I need the eggs.

-Woody Allen

Sometimes we are like the man who does not want to turn his brother in because we need the eggs.  What eggs?  Our own illusion of our self-fabricated lives.  We rather hold onto a worn-out illusion because it is easier than force ourselves to change or to see ourselves differently.  As Lesser says, “We don’t want to consider that perhaps we’re wrong about a couple of things:  perhaps our victim stance is a cover-up; maybe our ex or our boss or our parent is not the monster we’ve made them out to be.  Maybe we need to ask ourselves, What’s in it for us to keep seeing the world in a certain light?  What eggs do we think we need?”

Lesser warns that we also should not be trying to court catastrophe in hopes that we can have an incredible divine rod hit us from above.  We are not more or less special because of a certain circumstance that has befallen us.  Instead, we can glean from the myriad large and small “encumbrances” that affect our daily lives and that can provide grist for the mill.  We should be alert for life’s messages to help guide us in our journey.  If we are broken open, then we can learn from not being broken down.  If we have not been broken open, we can still be our own catalyst for change so that we do not continue to guard our own precious illusory eggs.

Trungpa teaches that many people pray for life to turn out in a certain way.  Instead, he encourages us all to learn from what life already has decreed, i.e., for us to look at life’s messages in the events that we have already lived.  As Lesser says, “I try to apply Trungpa’s wisdom especially when I am at work and nothing seems to flow easily.  The meeting that is turning acrimonious, the project that is failing, or the assistant who is moving:  Each of these situations is a reservoir of meaning, a bank of rich information.  The answer to every problem is wrapped in the problem itself.  I need only stop resisting, open wide to reality, and decode the message.”

Well put.  Sometimes, we try to force our own destiny and only accept a destiny that is framed by our narrow construct of it.  If things are not going our way, we become alarmed rather than look at what message that a certain event may actually hold for us.  For example, I was involved in a minor fender-bender that was my fault.  I thought I was in the left lane in a narrow street but there was another lane to my left, as I tried to turn into an empanada restaurant, scraping the unsuspecting car to the left of me.  I remained at peace during the incident, was thankful that no one was hurt, and offered a prayer of gratitude that I could learn to be a more careful driver in the future.  That was my message that I decoded.

Life may not throw at you a perfect recipe every time.  You have to make a great meal from whatever recipe is given to you.  Find that hidden message in your daily life and look with appreciation at the message that may help you move forward in life along your journey.  Remain comfortable with the uncertainty of your future life.  You can do that when you start to see only messages rather than obstacles in your life’s journey.

His concept of “no birth, no death” is distinctly Buddhist, as he is a Buddhist monk.  To illustrate he holds up a single sheet of paper and exclaims that this is not just a piece of paper in his hand but he is also holding a tree since the paper emerged from a tree along with the clouds that caused rain to facilitate the tree’s growth that led to the paper.  Further, we touch sunshine when we touch the paper because the sunshine nourished the growth of the tree just as much as the clouds did.

What Thay is getting at beyond a metaphysical explanation of a sheet of paper is that continuity of life rather than the abrupt starting and end points that we typically consider are what matter.  Without needing to be a Buddhist, we can see each of us as continuity of one another and a continuity of a larger life force.  By doing so, we relinquish our ego more fervently like Ram Dass has done.  Hopefully, we can do that without the need to be as broken open as hard as the great guru.  We need to see ourselves as a part of the whole.  Today, hold a sheet of paper and touch the sunshine.  See everyone around you as just an extension of who you are and where you have come.  Divorce your own egoistic mind and share in our commonality and continuity.

Richard Alpert was a young psychology professor at Harvard in the 1960s on a meteoric rise in his career until his experimentation with the counter culture and drug expanding experiments alongside his colleague Timothy Leary forced him out of the conservative academic bastion that did not accept his liberal leanings.  After a trip to India in the 1970s, he donned the name Ram Dass, meaning “Servant of God”, by his mentor there.  He became a great teacher and writer, most famously for his book, Be Here Now.

In 1997, Ram Dass suffered a catastrophic, hemorrhagic stroke that left him wheelchair bound and literally speechless.  His book, Still Here, recounts his emergence from that incident that had only a 10% chance of survival, a fact that did not escape the appreciative guru.  Lesser had worked with Ram Dass at her Omega Institute on many occasions but had not seen him due to a personal disagreement and subsequently happened to be out of town upon his next visit to Omega.  When the stroke occurred, she was simultaneously grieving the loss of her 85-year-old father and so had not seen Ram Dass until about a year after his stroke.

When she encountered him for the first time in a long while, she felt her heart settled and his as well.  They embraced as old friends, colleagues, and heart warriors.  When Lesser asked Ram Dass what the stroke had done to him, he replied, “Before…before stroke, before–happy grace…love grace…good things kept happening to me.  Then, stroke…lose things…also grace…fierce grace.”

Lesser returned, “I understand.  What did you lose?  What did fierce grace take away?”

“Ego”, Ram Dass said, “Ego, gone.  Nothing more to lose.  Ego breaks open–then you see who you really are.  The ego. The ego.  It’s like this wheelchair.  It’s a…It’s a beautiful wheelchair.  Use it.  Enjoy it!  Just don’t think it is you…Don’t take yourself so, so…personally.”

I think that is a beautiful exchange and helps us to remember that we are just “bozos on the bus” of life.  We are not our ego.  We are not our own prideful self.  We are merely reflections of our divine origins and must be humble in the face of that knowledge.

This vivid imagery is to have one look within to see what is the fire that needs to be lit to burn an old self and to bring oneself forward into a new life, a better life, and a richer one as well.  She says that many of the women she works with live lives to please others around them without owning up to the fear of letting that way of life go. The fire they need to burn is to let go of their need to live a surrogate life.

She has observed that men on the other hand oftentimes live a half-lived life because of their inability to feel or to offer compassion.  When they go through the phoenix process, they awaken with joy, empathy, and with an open heart.

What is your fire?  What will you burn so that you can rise again as a phoenix into a new and more vivid existence?  What are the vestiges of your old self that are lingering before the fire:  lack of faith, hatred, fear, ego?  What will it take for you to be reborn through the fire?

“When we slow down, when we relax our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle.  Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear.  Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes.  You are about to produce rain or waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic at the same time.  That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.”

We very much prize the power of the human brain here in the West as the navigation source for our lives.  We think ourselves into what we need to do and how we should structure our lives.  We leave feelings unexplored because as Lesser says, they are “messy” but life can be messy and less tidy than our small brains can envision.  We can become heart warriors by opening our hearts and allowing them to guide us forward in our decision making and to use emotional intelligence as our cornerstone on how we lead our lives and how we progress forward every day.

Although I cannot deny my own cerebral leanings, I am now a much more intuitive and heart-centered individual and follow my intuitive heartstrings to guide me much more than in the past.  I have become increasingly more self aware and less mentally constrained by giving my brain a break.  The sadness that Trungpa talks about is a bit of our letting go the forced vision of who we are, seeing our vulnerable side and allowing us to become fearless in our heart quest.  Sorry to all you rationalists out there!

The expression “bozos on the bus” is meant for all of us to take what we do a little less seriously.  Sometimes we are so imbued with the urgency to present a serious and perfect face to everyone around us that we cannot see that we are all just “bozos on the bus”.  What Lesser is getting at is that we have frailties and failures like everyone else; we just don’t show them to someone else.  There is this false sense of “Why can’t I be like Susan?  She’s got it all together.”  Does she though?  Don’t we just offer false platitudes when someone comes up to us and says, “How are the kids?”  ”Oh fine.  Doing well.”  ”How about Tom?”  ”Great.  Never better.”  Maybe we mean, “My kids are struggling in school and my husband and I are separated.”  We always put our best foot forward so that we never appear like a bozo.  But come on!  We are all just bozos on a bus.

We all can take ourselves a little less seriously and expose a little of our raw side so that we can be a little human.  I remember for my high school prom night that I was trying so hard in my poorly fitting tuxedo to impress my date and to look the part.  All that fell apart when I was trying to find my destination well before the era of GPS, iPhones with maps, and Mapquest.  I think a 5 minute ride turned into a 30 minute excursion.  Of course, my perfect sense of myself rarely allows me to admit my bad sense of direction because a guy is not supposed to have that, right?  Okay, I’m just a bozo on a bus like all of you.

She uses a phrase from the poet William James to capture the idea of two kinds of people, so-called “once born” and “twice born”.  Once born individuals live life with a certain, prescribed path.  They never veer from their structured direction whether or not that direction is fulfilling for them or worthy of their life’s endeavor.  She mixes James’ imagery with the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s metaphor of the “dark forest”.  She says that “once born” individuals follow their life’s pathway and when they come near to the edge of the dark forest, they turn away and go back onto assured footing.  The “twice born” will penetrate the dark forest, meander through an uncertain pathway, and emerge on the other side a new being, better than their half lived lives before they entered.

She cautions the liberal use of the reductionist terms “once born” and “twice born” as being categories that may evoke elitism for any twice born individual to claim superiority over someone who is once born.  Being broken open is not a necessity for growth but one that may facilitate a more profound level of growth, those things could be a loss of a job, loss of a loved one, a crippling physical handicap, etc.  When we are broken, we can use that adversity not to break us down but to break us open, to facilitate our growth and be the catalyst for change.

For example, I have always wanted to be a doctor.  I refined that idea by wanting to be a head and neck surgeon.  Then I refined that idea by wanting to be a facial plastic surgeon.  Then I refined that idea by wanting to be a hair transplant surgeon in addition to being a facial plastic surgeon.  As I marched down this steady pathway I was never broken open.  I never changed jobs or moved toward another position in my life. Does that mean that I am a lesser person for being “once born” in my career?  Obviously not.

In my personal life, my father was stricken with a debilitating illness that left him finally unable to walk and to see only out of one eye at the remainder of his life in addition to being in constant pain and discomfort.  I was broken open by my father’s experience and so was he.  From my dad’s condition, I have become more sensitive to others’ suffering and have made it my life’s mission to heal and to help others through my work.

We all can grow, change, and live through adversity by seeing our adversity as a vehicle for our own personal change.  We have talked a lot in previous blogs about the power of an adverse event to be a wonderful blessing if we change our attitude and our gratitude toward it.