In the summer of 1975 or 1976 I began to write a series of short stories which later developed into a science fiction fantasy, called “Gruffworld.” When I look back upon it, Krishnamurti and Langs were fused together as I depicted an apocalytic existence in an apocalyptic world. That is, a merger of spiritual and psychoanalytic truths. Essentially I write of an emerging presence, a creature evolving from childhood into adulthood, bereft of parenting, abandoned and lonely and alone, separation the very mode of his being. As I review it in mind now it is all an allegory about my own benign neglect as a child. Gruff struggled with one appalling thing: awareness, the “kind” that K spoke of, the kind of awareness which is free of choice — come for the ride as I go into this. K posits in many of his writings as I understand them that choice is a divider, the very act of deciding is a split, and that causes conlfict and personal sorrow. Ironically as a therapist I was working with clients to think in terms of choices, for many of them were so constipated as selves that they could not flex their minds in order to see options other than the straight-laced ones they had come upon by default, serendipity or accident. This flies in the face of what K was dialoguing about. I was on Maugham’s razor’s edge.
So for K choiceless awareness is the ability to be aware in the moment without the incoming streams of past thought or memory, knowledge, instruction, conditioning. He explained that this kind of awareness, if free of the need to choose, a kind of negative space, brings one into a place of clear cognition and understanding. In the fantasy I was writing I was attempting to bring Gruff into that kind of state, going so far as calling a chapter “Choiceless Awareness.” In fact, now as I think about it, a symbolic attempt to integrate, to bring together disparate parts of myself, for I believe I have struggled in some fashion to become whole for my entire life. If I were to crave an epiphany, it would be a moment of wholeness. Struggle ceases when one is entire.
It is only after 300 pages that I really got down to business. I had the creature carve into steles near a broiling, tempest-ridden sea, in which hideous, malformed creatures swam, what he had learned. I will later on incorporate a few paragraphs from the novel so as to let you see how I failed, but that the struggle I was enduring is metabolized onto these steles. The significance as I see it is that I was living a parallel existence and that in my novel I was trying, unlike this memoir, fictionally, to describe what I was undergoing, seeking to emerge into another state, or at least evolve. I was not into transcending, that is another spiritual matter. What is truthful is that I had no idea at that time what I was working out on an unconscious level; only years later did I see the book differently, as I diary of a kind, a Bilsdungroman. Perhaps, to some degree, it was my own awakening of intelligence. Thirty-five years later I view the book as my first completed novel, one which taught me many things about the art or craft of fiction. Rereading it now, it could use an editor’s scapel, for it is long-winded here and there, but there are nuggets of personal insight which give me pleasure. By the way, have I ever attained choiceless awareness? I can say definitely not. Wouldn’t know it if it bit me on my ass. Like many of K’s thinkings or insights, I personally find them unattainable except for a handy few, much like a kid with a select grouping of marbles in his pocket and one good shooter — less is more. Never would make a good acolyte.
The very first story of the book was later published as a short story, “Covenant,” in Owlflight, a reputable science fiction magazine. No more after that. Only now do I consider going back to that novel and see if I can edit it. I grow impatient as I read the pages because so much change has occurred in myself that other than a possibly good story, if thinned out, who that person is in that book is no longer the writer I am now, or the person I am now. It is more of a record of a younger self trying to improve or better himself as a person, to garner insight, to grow, to enlarge his personal spectrum about the world. I was having a literary dialogue with myself, which might be a good definition of any decent novel.
Writing has served me as a way to, a tao to comprehend who I am, for in writing I define and explicate myself, although beset and confronted on all sides by doubts, weak thinking, false self prophets, and all the rest that assails each one of us as we set out to say who we are in between the poles of pre-existence and death. I associate to K as a kind of handrail on a bridge which I use to steady myself as the heights below are sickening. As the years went on through the eighties and nineties after K’s death I continued to throw stones across the water, but my interest in him waxed and waned and I discovered if I was faced with significant issues in my life I went back to read his thoughts on such and such. He was not my bible, but more of a Baedecker: after all, life was a demented tour, was it not?
As I suffer from cardiovascular disease, I have a fairly good idea of how I will close out my sentence here on earth. With that in mind almost every day I see as the last day. One does not run around with that knowledge like a chicken in a coop. One just gets on with it, a ruefulness descends and like everyone of us we accommodate ourselves to the inevitable. What learnings we have gathered or I have learned really do not hold me in good stead. As I observed K in his writings over the decades he was evolving. A deepening occurred in what he had to say and earlier themes were dropped or developed in different fashion. One cannot account for any creative expression; it just is. You cannot follow K, nor can you condense his teachings into some kind of mental or emotional flashcard to use at the moment. Like the flight of an eagle, it leaves no mark. I wonder what his purpose is for me. What is it that I require from him other than his illuminating psychological insights into human behavior. It is like asking, what is I want from Freud, what is it I want from my parents? what is it I want from the world? Am I a passive student or an active doer? What does Man want?
Once asked by a companion what did he think he attained after all these decades of teaching, for many listened but did not hear, that societies were still riven, war continued on, religion exploited the masses, he replied, a rose has to give off its essence. I think ducks and drakes with K was perhaps just observing a fascinating presence work out his own existence in so many different ways as if he were modeling for us what we could do in our own idiosyncratic ways with our own idiosyncratic lives. I associate to the idea that we mere mortals often got too involved with what was really his litter, that which he dispensed with after he worked out things in his mind. I think of a friend of his, Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the great poets of the Twentieth Century. I can only imagine the conversation these two engaged in. Kazantzakis was a mystic, diplomat, novelist, who broke out with stigmata at times, and in his The Last Temptation of Christ and his magnificent confessional Report to Greco exposed his own struggle as a man to transcend, or as he wrote “to reach what you cannot.” Often I think of his epitaph: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Double Wow! and Whew! Kazantzakis and Krishnamurti have touched upon that latent, perhaps slumbering spiritual sciatica that has lain dormant within me.
Essentially how frou frou of me to be absorbed by ambition, greed, making money when my existence is so very short. Can’t I be serious about life?
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