Travels (39 page)

Finally she managed to flick sand into the face of one of the young children standing nearby. The child began to cry in the darkness. The Malays yelled at the turtle and cursed it. The Chinese took more flash pictures in rapid succession. One of the Chinese men posed near the turtle’s head, holding a bottle of beer to the turtle, as if to offer it a drink. Flash. Laughter.

The boy on the motor scooter zoomed up, parked his bike. The other people fell silent. I wondered if he was an official of some sort, but when he stepped into the light I saw he was only ten or eleven. He spoke quietly, apparently telling them about the turtle. From his gestures, it seemed he was explaining what the turtle was doing. He pointed out her tracks, all the way up the beach. How she had laboriously turned around to face back to the ocean. How long she had worked to dig her pit. How much effort it was costing her to lay her eggs. And, after she laid her eggs, how many hours she would lie here, exhausted, trying to find the strength to struggle back toward the water, to return to the surf by daybreak.

They listened in silence. The young Chinese boy got off the turtle’s back. The child stopped crying, and was encouraged to touch the turtle’s shell, to make peace with the great creature. The entire atmosphere became more respectful. They stepped back from the pit. I thought, They only needed to understand what was happening to this creature. They could not imagine without being told, but once they were told, they became sympathetic and understanding.

Finally they drifted away. I sat there. The boy sat near me in the darkness.

“English?”

“American.”

“Ah, American. Rono Reagan.”

“Yes.”

He pointed to the departing people. “They go now. They see the turtle and they go.”

“What did you tell them?” I asked.

“They say, want to buy eggs,” he said. “I tell them where to buy eggs, they leave now.”

“They will go and buy eggs?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I tell them about the turtle, about the eggs. They listen.”

“Ah.”

“And I tell them the cost for eggs. The woman say too much. I think they will not buy.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “No.”

The turtle remained in the pit, moving a flipper occasionally. After an hour, another group of people arrived. There were more flashbulbs, more poses. I went home.

Cactus Teachings
 

In the fall of 1982 I attended Brugh Joy’s conference in the Lucerne Valley desert, in California. Brugh Joy was an eminent Los Angeles physician who had, through intensive meditation, moved progressively away from medicine into areas of personal growth, psychic healing, and so on. For several years he had run two-week conferences in which he shared his findings.

To me this seemed like the first appropriate opportunity to do something in an area of interest which I had had since 1973. After all, when you read a book by Ram Dass, you could see he was always doing something new: living in a Zen monastery, doing breathing exercises, fasting, staying with his guru in India. You had the impression that he was trying many different kinds of experiences.

I had only read about such experiences; I hadn’t actually had any of my own. For ten years I had done nothing except read. And ten years is a long time to maintain an interest at arm’s length. I was beginning to wonder if my interest was genuine, or if I was just making excuses.

It was with relief that I learned that Brugh Joy, a somber medical man, trained at Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, had taken his own spiritual journey and now was helping others. His conference seemed the ideal starting place for me.

* * *

The conference was held at the Institute of Mentalphysics, in Lucerne Valley. The institute buildings, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, must have been advanced for their time but now looked distinctly eccentric. The science of mentalphysics (“The Faultless Philosophy of Life”) was founded by Edwin J. Dingle, who had been to Tibet in the 1920s. There were faded photos of Tibetan holy men, and Art Deco posters showing the right way to avoid constipation and other health problems. Thus the institute displayed all the hallmarks of California-oddball spiritualism, with the added disadvantage of being out of date.

Brugh Joy turned out to be a pale, slender man in his forties. He drove an old Cadillac, wore jeans and a casual sport shirt. He was gentle, soft-spoken, and noticeably reserved.

Forty other people attended the seminar. I was reassured to see a large number of buttoned-down professional types, including many physicians and psychologists.

At our first dinner, on Sunday, Brugh announced the rules for the next two weeks. No telephone calls in or out. No leaving the grounds: if we needed anything, someone would go into town and get it for us. No sex, and no drugs. There would be daily group sessions, but he didn’t care if we attended them; we would get the benefit of the sessions whether we attended or not.

He said we could either sleep in our rooms or in the desert. He talked about rattlesnakes, and said that nobody had ever been bitten by a snake during his conferences but that if we insisted on being the first, this is how we should behave.…

Implicit in his talk was the idea that soon we would all be wandering around in different states of consciousness. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded interesting.

The conference followed a daily routine. There was silence every morning from six-thirty until eight, when we met for breakfast. Meditation during this time was encouraged but not required.

At nine we met in a large conference room. We began by lying on the floor on pillows. Brugh would play loud music from huge speakers for about half an hour. The intensity and vibration made the experience very powerful; people would have waking dreams, and often cry. Afterward we would sit in a circle, hold hands for a moment, and discuss our dreams. Then Brugh would give an informal lecture, and we would break for lunch at twelve-thirty.

In the afternoons we met in small groups, or hiked, or sat around the swimming pool, or slept.

Dinner was at six, followed by an evening session, which again started with music. The evening session continued until ten o’clock, and then we broke for the night.

Brugh played all sorts of music—classical music, electronic music, popular music. Brahms’s First Symphony, the soundtrack from
Chariots of Fire
, the
William Tell
Overture, the music from
West Side Story
. You never knew what you were going to hear.

Meals tended to be light and nearly vegetarian. Just when you got used to that, you’d get Southern fried chicken and corn on the cob, or roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Brugh generally lectured, but sometimes he broke up the group to do exercises. One day he passed out notebooks and boxes of colored pens, and said we should draw pictures or write—whichever we were least comfortable doing.

Then, in the middle of the conference, he announced we would have two days of fasting and silence.

Soon it became clear to me that the sense of routine was illusory. Brugh was carefully orchestrating events so that, in a gentle way, you were constantly kept off balance. You didn’t know what to expect. You didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Early on, he said he wanted us to walk in the desert until we found a rock or a tree or a plant that seemed to have a special relationship to us, and then to spend time with this “teacher,” and talk with the teacher, and learn what the teacher had to teach us.

I had read about such practices, using an inanimate object as a meditative or spiritual teacher. Why not? I was here, I might as well go along with the program.

So I set out to find my teacher.

Brugh had said the teacher would make itself known; all you had to do was be receptive. I looked at every rock and bush and Joshua tree in the desert, wondering if it was the teacher.

I had a romantic view of all this. I imagined myself sitting out in the desert for hours, communing with my teacher in splendid solitude. But nothing in the desert seemed compelling to me. Instead I had the persistent feeling that my teacher wasn’t out in the desert at all, but within the institute. I didn’t like this idea. I wanted a teacher far off.
A teacher near these Frank Lloyd Wright buildings just didn’t suit me at all.

There was a small meditation room located in one corner of the institute grounds. In front of this meditation room was a rock garden of boulders and many kinds of cacti. And one particular cactus, right at the edge of the pavement, where the rock garden began, caught my eye whenever I passed by.

And kept catching my eye.

This made me unhappy. The rock garden was artificial, a contrived version of nature. It was bad enough that my teacher might be on the institute grounds—but to be in this artificial garden was adding insult to injury. Furthermore, I didn’t like this cactus. It was common, a sort of phallic cactus shape with lots of thorns. It was rather battered, with scars on one side. It was not in any way an attractive cactus.

But I kept staring at it. And meanwhile the days were going by, other people were finding their teachers, and I still hadn’t settled on mine. I was feeling some pressure. I was feeling like a lazy student. I was falling behind.

One morning I was walking to the meditation room and I passed the cactus and I thought, Well, if this cactus is really my teacher, it’ll speak to me.

And the cactus said, “When are you going to stop running around and talk?” Irritably. Like a grouchy old man.

I didn’t hear it as an actual voice, I just felt it like an impression. The way you can see someone and get an impression of what is going on with him or her. But I was startled to get a sense of personality coming from a cactus.

It was early in the morning. Nobody else was around. So I said out loud, “Are you my teacher?”

No answer.

“Will you talk to me?” I said. I was really looking around now, making sure nobody could see me standing there talking to a cactus.

The cactus did not answer.

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

No answer.

It was just a cactus, sitting there. Of course it didn’t answer—it was a cactus. I thought, I am talking out loud to a cactus, which is bad enough. But, worse, I am felling annoyed that it won’t answer. This is definitely crazy behavior. They lock people up for this.

Yet at the same time I had the feeling that the cactus was sulking. Its feelings were hurt, or else it was just being hard to get along with.

“I’ll come back and talk to you later.”

No answer.

I came back and talked to the cactus later. Again there was no one around. I sat for an hour with the cactus, and talked to it. The cactus never said a single word in reply. I felt self-conscious and foolish. Of course, it would have been pretty alarming if the cactus had actually spoken. But from the standpoint of a person engaged in a spiritual exercise that involved projecting one’s thoughts onto an inanimate object, I wasn’t doing very well if I couldn’t imagine any responses from the inanimate object. I was a poor student of metaphysics, with poor concentration, poor ability to imagine. I berated myself. I suspected other people were having wonderful, informative chats with their rocks and shrubs.

However, I felt increasingly convinced that this cactus was my teacher. Challenging and annoying and silent, but my teacher.

I decided to draw the cactus, because drawing something makes you pay close attention to it. Also, I wouldn’t feel so self-conscious if someone came across me while I was sitting there drawing the cactus. I drew the cactus a dozen times. It was very revealing.

The cactus was at the edge of civilization. The cactus was positioned where the pavement stopped, like a sort of sentry. The cactus had been transplanted from a natural setting to a manmade garden, making it somewhat on display its entire life. A kind of showpiece, despite its own personal preferences. The cactus had a crew cut of thorns, giving it a military appearance. This cactus had had a rough life, and had been injured when young; one side of it was scarred and atrophied. You could see where the injury had occurred in earlier growth, and had twisted the growing cactus permanently. The thorns were especially dense and protective over the injured area. The only part of the cactus that was growing was the green tip. The rest was just supporting history. The cactus had equanimity; ants ran over its surface, and it didn’t seem to mind. It was certainly attractive, with red thorns and a green body; bees were attracted to it. The cactus had a formal aspect; its pattern of thorns gave it almost a herringbone look. This was an Ivy League cactus. I saw it as dignified, silent, stoic, and out of place.

I drew it again and again.

One day, as I arrived with my notebook and pens, the cactus said, “Where have you been?” In that same irritable, resentful tone.

I was surprised. It hadn’t spoken since the first day. And this time I really felt as if it had spoken aloud.

I said to the cactus, “What do you care? You haven’t said one word to me; why should I hang around all day in the hot sun waiting for you
to say something?” Because I was defensive. I felt I had been criticized.