1. The Road Less Traveled.
The autobiography of an un-disappointed man.
My search probably began the day after my birth, during a midsummer heatwave in 1940, in a one-doctor, pre-penicillin, un–air-conditioned hospital in Australia. For no obvious reason, my temperature hit 103°F (39.4°C) and the desperate physician plunged me into crushed ice water, leaving only my face exposed.
Call it visceral disillusionment, but even as a child I found incarnate human life to be shabbier, more painful and more anxious than necessary, and grownups’ explanations unconvincing. Naively, I was searching for answers to mankind’s Three Great Questions: What is this? What are we doing here? What happens next?
Fortunately, I was blessed with a formidably bright mother who left school at fifteen to support and raise her siblings after her father died. Her less-bright cousin went on to a Nobel nomination and, determined that nothing would obstruct my education, she willingly sacrificed everything for it.
A practicing—not talking—Christian, she admired the French theology of Teilhard de Chardin and regularly defended it to my paternal uncle, a professional, Roman-trained theologian. When she mentioned my growing religious skepticism, he gave me The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo, but I found it disappointing. Augustine was great scholar and reformer, but he died still searching for Jesus. If a great Saint couldn’t find Jesus after forty years, what chance did I have?
Another of my mother’s favorites, Thomas Merton (a monk with whom Jack Kennedy corresponded), called his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. Again, after a thirty holy years he concluded, “Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: let this be the ending of the book but not the end of the search”. Still searching after all these years. And it wasn’t just religious seekers. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, would later prove similarly upbeat and equally empty-handed.
Increasingly suspicious, I bought The Golden Bough, whose author, J.G. Fraser, traces all ancient religions to the Resurrected God myth. Vicarious hope and reassurance for people afraid of death, which is pretty much everyone. But reassurance didn’t cut into my unhappiness.
At seventeen, I found The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, which The New York Times called ‘one of the most remarkable spiritual documents of the 20th century’. Remarkably exotic perhaps, but Yogananda lived and died just as addicted to yogic experiences as athletes are addicted to endorphins. His experiences certainly sounded more fun than roller-coaster rides, but so what?
Then real life intruded. Our neighbors’s oldest son and I were altar boys, but his younger brother was different. Naturally devout, he’d slip into the empty church after school and in his mid-teens he began having visions of Jesus. Naturally, I was fascinated. Saints and visions go together, visions were part of saintliness, I’d been told. But the boy did not return next term and I later learned that his parents had institutionalized him. Hmm.
An unbroken record of uninterrupted failure
Thousands of years of Spiritual history were never recorded and what we have was written after the events, usually by people who never knew the protagonists, but nobody left a first-hand account of their face-to-face experience with a genuine Spiritual Master. If a Spiritual Master enlightened someone, how did they do that? What’s it like from the point of view of the person being enlightened? Or was I wasting my time?
Did Spiritual Transmission end centuries ago? Did I miss the boat? I was blessed with a wonderful family, a happy childhood, good health, abundant energy, sufficient money and an indulgent wife, and desperate unhappiness. Surely someone, somewhere knew what was going on? Though I had one reservation: if I was going to abandon my childhood Spiritual Master, Jesus, it would only be for someone better.
So I set off to find Him.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—o0o—
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