The Haunted Forest: A Spiritwalk:
Part 3
By Donald Walker © 2003
When I was a very
young man, perhaps thirty years ago, I wrote a horror novel. Looking
back, I realize that it wasn't very good, although I did save some
ideas and snippets of characters for later work. I let my father
read the manuscript and at the end, when those characters who'd made
it through the ordeal had finally put the enemy down and turned to
the ruin of their lives to start up again, the book just ended. My
father asked "what is their reward?" "They live," I replied. He
looked puzzled, then troubled. "After all they've been through,
that's it. There's nothing better for them? Their lives just
continue as if nothing had happened?"
He seemed deeply disturbed by this notion, that, after all this
struggle and loss, that their eventual triumph brought nothing else.
They were not elevated to exalted status. No one stood up, held
laurel wreathes over their heads, and called out to the adulating
masses "Praise them with great praise!" They weren't given the keys
to what was left of the city. No one handed them a cashier's check
for a million bucks. But they didn't die, either. And the next
morning they knew that today, at least, they weren't going to have
to battle for their lives against a faceless power that seemed to
know their minds and weaknesses. As I said, the novel wasn't much--I
read a couple chapters a few years ago and winced and thought "Wow,
what was I thinking!?! My, that was bad."
But as I wrote the first two essays in this series, as I told about
finding the bones of the boy in the woods, as I thought about my
father's terrifying descent into alcoholism, and my own years
clawing at the edge of that same abyss, I wondered why, in the end,
I was able to pull myself out while my father was dragged down and
down and down. And I thought of that time, all those years ago, when
my father put down the story with grief in his eyes because the
characters received nothing more for their pains than life. Life
itself was not enough for him. Not that it necessarily was for me,
but somewhere, somehow, I saw more potential in "just life" than my
father had.
I only remembered this incident a year or so ago. And as troubling
as this memory is,. I think it was this understanding of how bereft
he must have been that finally allowed me to get past the hate and
disgust I'd felt for him most of my adult life, hate because of the
senseless way he'd abandoned my sisters and me as he retreated into
the bottle, disgust as I watched him dissolve into a puddle of gray
ooze that was scarcely recognizable as human. And anger and disgust
with myself on those occasions when I felt myself being drawn after
him, into the same abyss. I realized that he was incapable of
synthesizing joy from life. He appreciated things of beauty, art and
music, a peaceful valley on a spring morning, but there was always a
melancholy aspect to these things for him, as thought they were not
part of his life, and never could be. He could see them, respond to
them, but somehow, in his heart, they were never "for" him.
Recently, when I'd completed a sculpture and stood back to look at
it, I knew that at no point in his life had my father ever truly
felt as I did at that moment. He never felt that same sense of
completion, of satisfaction that my idea had come to life in my
hands and stood before me, very much as I'd seen it first in my
mind's eye. He was always the kid with his nose pressed against the
window of the candy store, never the kid inside, tapping his coins
on the counter to get the proprietor's attention.
At my father's funeral, one of his oldest friends spoke about how
the Great Depression had imprinted itself on my father's psyche. The
deprivation of those times--that he'd experienced and that he'd seen
others experience had left him with a keen sense of the injustice of
the world. It was sense of injustice that he took personally. But it
had done something else as well. It had left him a dogged
materialist. He rejected, even despised anything that touched upon
the spirit. In all my life, I never knew him to set foot in a church
of any kind--he would stop at the doors as though the hand of God
barred him personally. He professed to believe that all who sought
the spirit were deluded, and if they weren't deluded then they were
charlatans, out to delude others.
And yet he read mythology voraciously. There were over 6,000 books
in our house. I know because whenever we moved, and we moved at
least once a year from the time I was thirteen until I finally
abandoned my family at age nineteen, and sometimes two or three
times a year, the largest component of the move was books--boxes and
boxes of books. He would go to liquor stores for their boxes because
they were stronger and of a size that, when packed with books,
wouldn't be too heavy to lift. I'd first read the Bhagavad Gita
when I was ten, in a Mentor edition I found in the bathroom one
night. On our shelves you could find several different versions of
the Bible, translations of the Koran, the Upanishads,
collections of native American legends, African myths, myths of the
Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, the Egyptians. Frazer's The Golden
Bough was perhaps his favorite book. And like Frazer, my father
did not see, reflected in all this lore some glimmer of universal
spiritual truth, but rather evidence of a great falsehood. He read
these myths and tales looking for the material explanations behind
them and there had to be a material explanation. Even the notion of
metaphor was lost on him because metaphor is immaterial. Simile he
could understand but metaphor seemed to him to be one step away from
metaphysics and hence was simply wrong.
And still he and my mother, whose spiritual leanings were unknown to
anyone, sent me to a Lutheran parochial school for first, second and
third grade. Go figure. Both my parents went to their graves without
explaining to anyone that peculiar contradiction. My grandmother
believed that they wanted the status of saying their son was in a
private school. My uncle thought it was because they didn't want me
to cross the street. Who knows! I've even had it suggested to me
that perhaps he thought that if I saw first hand what utter nonsense
it all was, that it would cure me forever of any religious feelings.
And perhaps that suggestion was the closest to the mark, because it
damned near did--as least as far as Christianity went.
For decades after those first three years of elementary school the
notion of church gave me the habdabs. Oh, I could enter a church,
especially a Catholic one, but only during the off hours, when it
was quiet. I felt uncomfortable during services, should I go
occasionally with a friend or lover. Later, I lost that discomfort
with services in general but to this day I have not set foot in a
Lutheran church. I can handle Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Coptics,
Catholics, Anglicans, Moravians, and Pentecostals. But if I hear "A
Mighty Fortress" booming on the organ, my first gut reaction is to
fire off a dispatch to Rome requesting an Inquisitor or two be sent
with all possible speed. But, if it was my father's intent to drive
any spiritual notions from my head, well, he failed.
As I said, I read the Bhagvad Gita when I was ten, the summer
between fifth and sixth grade I read the King James version of the
Bible cover to cover. I read about the Norse gods and the Olympians
and what I knew--KNEW--was that all these stories were true. I
couldn't tell you then how I knew this, or what I even meant by
this. I understood that they were not facts, like two plus two
equals four. But when I read them I felt something within me
vibrate. And I knew that that something was not material, that it
was transcendent.
When I announced to my therapist that I was going to seek the primal
spirit, the raw, unedited spiritual experience, what I didn't say to
him was that I never expected to find it. In my mind, it was a
quest, like the Grail quest, and that the power of the quest was in
the quest itself. Through this quest I would make sense of my own
spiritual confusions and form some sort of order to them. I believed
in my heart that spirit was something that could only be approached
obliquely. You can experience spirit but never know it, and I knew
that the quest was best undertaken, at least at that time, by
picking up where I'd left off those many years before, sending
myself into ecstatic trances, embracing the world of the shaman.
I followed a sparrow, my totem guide, through a looming black wall
that looked like smoke but was as impenetrable as steel. I burrowed
into a hill through a cave that became a vagina and was reborn into
the forest. I danced through that forest with hundreds of others,
naked in the firelight. I found myself splayed on a stone altar
while my mother cut my flesh away with a flint knife. And I found
myself in a deeper place, where there were no images, no sounds or
smells, no sensations at all except the resonance of spirit. It was
there, in that place where dark and light have no meaning, where
flesh is a myth, that I came to feel something of spirit.
I came to feel that every true religious, every mystic, every
artist, every seeker of whatever calling will, as a matter of
course, confront that raw, primal spirit. It is not an ephemeral
quest after all, it is essential. Even Sartre recognized this,
although his metaphor was purely materialistic in outlook, when he
discussed confronting the essence of existence after purging oneself
of all the overlays that we heap upon ourselves in the course of
daily life by immersing oneself in ennui.
This confrontation is a transcendent moment, indeed, the word moment
is simply a metaphorical reference point, because the experience of
spirit takes place out of time. The moment might last a heartbeat or
eternity, it is impossible to say because it has no analog in the
material world. For all Sartre's philosophy to the contrary, it is a
thing of pure spirit.
It is a transforming experience. The literature of saints and
mystics, ecstatics and artists, even existential philosophers is
rich with accounts of the experience. These accounts shimmer with
metaphor but if you try to look beyond the surface for the substance
of the encounter, if you look with rational eyes, if you try to
explain the experience in terms of neurons and axons, of seretonin
and acetylcholine, you will fail. You will fail because, in the end,
this experience takes place outside of the physical world, outside
of the emotional world.
Jung offers that religions exist, in part, to buffer us from this
experience, to provide spiritual sunscreen that keeps us from being
burned by the raw power of spirit. In part, I think this is true.
But I also believe that these disciplines exist to parcel out the
experience a bit at a time, to make it nourishing as opposed to
mutating. Bite-sized morsels of this experience are dispensed under
controlled circumstances, a piece of bread and a sip of wine, a
handful of maize cake, the roasted flesh of the horse. The
meditations of monks, the asceticism of Brahmins, the illness of the
shaman, the ritual ordeals of tribal initiations, all are designed
to prepare the individual for this encounter. To give the mind and
psyche and soul a lifeline out of the experience. The experience is
useless if, as can happen, it destroys the individual. And all the
mystics, all the saints, all the shamans and poets know, if they
cannot express, this one essential truth--that the experience is
dangerous.
Even with all this preparation the outcome is uncertain, at the
moment of spiritual transcendence, anything can happen. A person can
emerge from it as Rasputin or Mother Teresa. Indeed, I suspect that
all religion, all ritual exists to diffuse the experience, water it
down a bit for general consumption, and to forestall the end of
days. I can think of no better metaphor of what would happen should
a large number of people experience this confrontation with spirit
without these buffers than the Rapture anticipated by charismatic
fundamentalists. The bumper sticker that reads "In case of Rapture,
this car will be unmanned" says it like it is. Boy howdy, does it.
Because it has happened before. Ten thousand years ago something
happened to humanity. A social order that had served us for 300,000
years was swept away in a matter of a couple millennia. We entered
the experience small bands of hunter gatherers and emerged living in
stone cities. Before this experience we were a part of the world,
living essentially the same as our brothers the bears and our
sisters the salmon. Then we were cast out, the world had become
hostile, a challenge to be overcome. All the tales of the end of
days, from Ragnarok to the Kali Yuga to the Revelations of St. John
the Divine foretell the future, but they do so because they describe
the past. They are all echoes of this transcendent experience for
which we, as a species, were unprepared. The whole of the human race
experienced this.
Just as I, as a youth, ashamed and desperate fled to the realm of
spirit to escape, and unprepared and uninitiated, turned a corner in
the otherworld and ran smack-ass into SPIRIT.
I do not know what happened next, but having thought on this and
meditated, prayed and dreamed I think in my innocence, I experienced
a moment of Grace. When I came upon spirit it saw me, and in pity
did not transform me into a stag, to be run to ground and devoured
by my own hounds. Instead, it killed the boy to spare him pain he
could not endure and said, "These bones will lie here, at peace in
the forest. Seek them and when you are ready you will find them. And
then we will see what will be." It left me as dead in my spirit as
my father, but with one crucial difference--a spark. The blackness
was not total and at times that spark burned as brightly as the star
of Bethlehem, at other times it was as faint as the first stars of
twilight but it was always there.
And so, I perceived things, however bleak the moment, with a
different sense than my father. Life itself was not enough for him
because, for whatever reason, he simply closed himself off to a part
of life that made it whole. He was like a starving man who is
brought to a groaning table, takes a mouthful or two, then turns his
back on the rest of the feast, and walks away bitter because he is
still hungry. I believe he sought oblivion because some part of him
desperately craved spirit but he could never overcome his fears.
Perhaps he tiptoed through the woods or jungle, sensing the presence
but never daring to part the foliage and in the end, snuck away,
ashamed and disappointed. In my ignorance I went whistling through
the woods, came around a bend in the path, and stepped into the full
presence. I didn't have time to be afraid before the encounter, I
had decades afterwards to explore that fear in full.
For years, when he was in his cups, my father liked to tell a tale
from his young manhood. While he was in college, he went to a
psychiatrist for a year or so. He was troubled with a recurrent
nightmare in which he was in a jungle and being stalked by a lion.
No matter how he would run, the lion would always catch up to him.
Once the therapist asked him, "Do you have a gun?" "Yes," my father
replied. "Then why don't you just shoot the lion?" she asked in
return. One night he did just that and the dream never came again.
He always looked upon that moment as a triumph.
But now I believe that psychiatrist did him a profound disservice.
If I could go back and talk to him to him then, I would tell him to
throw down the gun, strip himself naked and stand before the lion. I
would stand with him. I don't know, but I feel, that had he done so,
his life would have been very different from then on. I can find no
better expression of my father's plight than to quote from the Isa
Upanishad, verse three:
There are
demon-haunted worlds,
regions of utter
darkness.
Whoever in life denies the Spirit
falls into that darkness of death.*
And that brings us
back, in marvelous mandala fashion, to the start where I talked
about those characters in my novel. Although the story ended, their
lives did not. They were either changed by the experience or they
were not. If they were, perhaps some were changed for good and some
for ill. Because, at the end of all the questing, the ritual, the
prayer, the transcendence, we come back to this--tomorrow the sun
will come up and it will be a sunny or a cloudy day or perhaps it
will storm. The news will be good or bad. We will brush our teeth
and shower and poop and have breakfast. We will go out to make art,
or sell widgets, or hunt mastodons. In short, tomorrow life will go
on.
And having passed through all this, passing through all this
continually, for spirit never leaves us, it is part of us and we are
part of it, whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or
not--we are left with life. And if we have truly learned from our
quest we will realize that saving face is not important, that
slights and insults seem trivial, our pride is supplanted by
satisfaction. We learn that life need not be a losing struggle, that
spirit has offered us all a moment of grace. We cannot suddenly
throw down all the trappings of civilization, clothe ourselves in
skins, and revert to our primal selves. But we can all look beyond
the surfaces of our lives, to the deep underlying currents. We can
see past the imagery of the Eucharist or the Ashmaveda and
experience, however fleetingly, the deeper truth within.
We can find those bones in the grove, deal with them, and set our
feet once again on the path through the forest. And the way may
still be dark and dangerous, but the forest is no longer haunted.
Donald R. Walker, 2003
drwhome@one.net
* From
the Penguin Classics edition of The Upanishads, translated by
Juan Mascaro.
Copyright 2003 Donald
R. Walker, all rights reserved
