I’m an ad hoc monk. I don’t have a monastery, order, abbot or creed. I may be the only one of my kind. (I doubt it.) My sole vow, is to live as spiritually and emotionally alive as possible. I have been coming to this calling for some time. I am an old man now, who has finally arrived at a solitudinal homeplace, he didn’t even know he was seeking. At the age of 76, I am at last finished with the things of this world, and now find myself, concerned mainly with the things that dwell in the margins.
It is a wonder to me that my life has carried me here, that my spirituality is intact, and that I’m still drawn to mystery. My life didn’t start that way. In fact, one of my fondest memories is of escaping the Catholic Church at age 13. Somehow, I got away, with my awe intact. Whatever moved me then, stayed hidden in my dreams, until it awakened again, at age sixteen, by the radio broadcasts of Alan Watts. Unknowingly, those meditations on Life, set me on a life-long quest I couldn’t have anticipated.
I spent my youth avoiding being drafted, and fighting the Vietnam war in America. I didn’t know it, but living in California, during the 60’s and 70’s, meant that I got to be exposed to the most contemporary and wildest spiritual impulses on the planet. I absorbed the gestalt of the period, looking to the east, feeling weighed down and inspired by tradition, exposed to crazy wisdom, loving the Earth, and being shaped by a host of creative and sensitive souls. It was a spiritual education that benefited by the aspirations of a generation driven by idealism, wonder, and awe. Even drugs were briefly sacred.
The turmoil of those times also misdirected me. I spent years wandering, not knowing myself, trying to fulfill a vague, and often contradictory, sense of belonging. I was a home-grown immigrant. I kept moving, but I went nowhere. I had many potential careers, but none of them stuck, and I felt more and more like an alien.
Luckily, along the way, I got some good therapy, and my therapist could see me better than I could. So, she persuaded me to try grad school. Oddly enough, I attended the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, a school that was oriented towards developing the spiritual nature. To make a long story short, I ended up as a psychotherapist, who basically believed that each of us has a spiritual dimension, that needs to be adequately integrated into our lives, for optimal health. Many client-lives later, I believed this even more fervently. Also, all those people, made it more evident to me, that spirituality took many forms; religious, spirit-based, natural, scientific rapture, synchronism, and many others. I was inculcated into the depths.
The stroke and its aftermath finished the job. Since then, mystery has had its way with me. Looking, as I am prone to do now, at it all, makes me realize, how much I owe to the intrepid seekers, who gave birth to what I now think of a kind of indigenous spirituality, that emerged here in California. I call it the Religion of No Religion.
Thank Esalen, The Human Potential Movement, Gestalt and Fritz Perls, Humanistic Psychology, Micheal Murphy, Barry Stevens, Transpersonalism, Abe Maslow, Joe Campbell, and many others!
This is what I owe my monkish tendencies to. The spirit of an age. Misunderstood, and perhaps antiquated, now, there are still a few of us captive of an awesomeness that goes beyond all names, and which keeps calling to us.
Some of us are monks, responding as best we can. We don’t wear robes, have a creed, a book, or a begging bowl. We are novices. All of us. Set adrift by the tides of illumined fate — we are monks — praying the liveliest prayers — in the cells of our hearts.
