I was born in 1960. It was a time that the modern American press euphemistically calls “Camelot.” President Kennedy and his beautiful young bride were the darlings of the media, and my dad was able to make a modest living working for the Federal Government. He and my mother purchased a modest home in San Diego California. Today, purchasing a modest home in most of Southern California is a major, major capital expenditure. Anyway, my dad, mom, brother and sister and I were perhaps the idealized fantasy of a fine middle-class working American family.
My parents were not what you could call practicing or believing Christians. My Mother did, however, let me attend vacation bible school with my neighborhood friends at Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego. I have no doubt that the young men and women and pastors of that church began praying for my salvation and that of my friends and family.
The Hounds of Heaven were unleashed.
In 1967 dad packed up the family and took us to live on an American Military instillation in what was then called West Germany. We lived on a Pershing nuclear missile base, during the Cold War, visions of Dr. Strangelove not withstanding.
While in Germany, I came into contact with a young solder that was a REAL Christian youth leader. I remember his name as Bobby Lawless. Bobby Lawless loved us and the love of Jesus shone through him.
My parents never were comfortable with traditional Christianity, and when I came home and announced that I was going to join the Jesus Freaks when we returned to the United States my mother sought to redirect my enthusiasm to spiritual directions more to her liking.
Bobby Lawless rotated back to the States and I became infatuated with the world. My family returned to San Diego.
It was during this time that I began to struggle with I perceived as my own suffering-typical for teenagers-and seeking answers for my misery. I suppose you could say that I was born at the end of the ME generation, obsessed with my own happiness and unhappy with the state of my Me-ness. I realized that I did things I really didn’t want to do, and acted in ways detrimental to myself. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t in control. I was miserable and unhappy and sought a solution to my questions, which were “Why can’t I control myself and why am I so miserable?”
During the summer of my fourteenth year, mom introduced me to the Church of Religious Science. The Church of Religious science was, and still is an organization that is very loosely affiliated with all of the off spring of Mortimer Mezmer and Finneous Quimby. The Unity Church and Christian Science Church and very similar to Religious Science.
I fell in love with the Church of Religious Science and it’s charismatic pastor in San Diego, Chet Castilaw. What miserable fourteen-year-old boy isn’t tempted to seek meaning and happiness in the products of modern worldliness, sex and pop psychology? Chet was charismatic, funny intelligent, a recovered alcoholic, a retired Hollywood comedy writer and a sexual predator. Fortunately for me, Chet didn’t like sex with boys. My sister, however, wasn’t so fortunate.
The church of religious science taught a gospel of worldly prosperity, godhood for individuals and total responsibility for outcomes in your own our life. Thought control, emotional control and right thinking were taught as the key to successful living, prosperity, good sex and a meaningful life.
So, at 14, I began praying-or in the lingo of Religious Science, “treating”-for a Porsche Turbo Carrera and a blond girlfriend. Both the objectives of my prayer and the motives behind them were not only acceptable in the Church of Religious Science, but were seen as signs of my growing healthy self-esteem.
Three and a half years later and fifteen thousand treatments and positive affirmations into the Church of Religious Science, I still had no Porsche and no blond girlfriend. My favorite affirmation “ Money loves me. Money loves to be in my pocket,” was wearing thin and I began to experience feeling a sort of metaphysical guilt. If the Church of Religious Science teaching was true, then it must be my lack of faith, or the poor quality of my faith or belief, or bad thinking or emotion that was keeping me from that 911 turbo carrera and slinky babe.
I remember one particular lecture that the sexual predator Chet Castillaw gave at the Church of Religious Science in San Diego. He said something to the effect that if I ever met a Tibetan Monk who had meditated in a cave for fifty years and had achieved enlightenment then I should follow him because he would be more advanced, but until then I should follow Chet. For some reason this really impacted me.
I took four years of seminars, practitioner training and pastor preparation classes from the Church of Religious Science before I finally realized that it was a fraud.
Then the movie Star Wars came along. I loved the movie Star Wars. I still do. After seeing Star Wars nine times in the first week of it’s release, I was watching re-runs of the old T.V. series “ Kung-FU,” at home. I wanted to be a mixture of Master Po and Luke Skywalker. I figured if I could only master myself and tap into my chi, or inner force or self, then my problems would be over.
My days with the church of Religious Science were over, so I picked up the trusty yellow pages and called the local Buddhist Information Society. My future Zen Master, Tennei Hogen answered my phone call. I joined Master Hogen’s Zendo and the East Tennei Zen Center in the city of Chula Vista, affiliated with the Tenneiji Temple and Soto Zen Sect, both of Japan.
I enjoyed the discipline of Soto Zen Buddhism. It was exotic and chic among the intellectual secular folks I fancied running with at the time. Master Hogen gave me the Buddhist name Tennei Chimori. I have since renounced, without reservation that name and everything associated with it. I now can say, without equivocation, that everything about Buddhism means nothing at all.
Two or so years into my Zen experience Hogen packed up and left for Japan. He left me in charge, at age 20, of the East Tennei Zen Center. I was president and chairman of the board. Needless to say, the center closed quickly. I continued on, however, with my Zen practice and Buddhist studies.
Around that time, I got a girlfriend. She wasn’t blond, but she was breathing. She convinced me to apply for and go to college. So, I became a college-boy.
College was fun. It abounded with new and stimulating ideas and studies, new friends, adventures and many, many hours in the library. I loved the library. I read every book on Buddhism in the San Diego State University Love library and the University of New Hampshire library. I thought about writing a book called “Zen Buddhism and the Grateful Dead,” what a concept.
I fell in love with another young college student one summer who went to school at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Shortly after meeting, I became an exchange student at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, a few hours away from Mount Holyoke. In addition to falling in love with the young lady, I fell in love with New England. New England is gorgeous.
One day, while cruising around Amherst Massachusetts with my woman, she mentioned that one of the world’s foremost scholars on Tibetan Buddhism was a professor, at that time, at Amherst College. His name was Robert Thurman. So, we walked up to his office door at Amherst College and came away with his home address and an invitation to meet the Tibetan monk Tara Tulku Rimpoche. Rimpoche was a bigwig with the Dali Lama and had spent some time meditating in a cave and had achieved a form of Buddhist enlightenment.
I was excited.
I trotted over to Dr. Thurman’s home and met Rimpoche. I was overjoyed and asked to have a private meeting with the master. I wanted to ask the monk my question about my own misery and lack of total self-control. Rimpoche was busy, but said if I could return at a later time he would be happy to visit with me. Several weeks later, I finally met with Rimpoche in the attic of Dr. Thurman’s home. Dr. Thurman acted as interrupter. It was a dream comes true.
So, there I was. In an attic in Amherst Massachusetts. With Uma’s dad, a glowing monk from the caves of Tibet and my unanswered questions. It was an exhilarating moment. I really thought that this man in red robes could unlock the door upon which I’d been knocking for the previous nine years. I took a deep breath and asked Dr. Thurman to ask Rimpoche, “ After all these years of trying, all this study, all these hours of meditation and devotion, why can’t I control myself and why am I miserable?” Dr. Thurman smiled, and asked Rompoche in Tibetan my precious questions.
I was stunned by his answer. He chuckled and said, “ You haven’t tried hard enough.”
I was speechless. My world came crashing down around my feet. The answer “ You haven’t tried hard enough.” Was not what I was expecting? Deep in the dark recesses of my mind, through all my denial, distortion and repression, the truth whispered to me,
“ You’ve been had, again!” Speechless and shaken I said thank you to Rimpoche, thank you to Dr. Thurman and left.
My fantasy about finding the secret truth, or Nirvana, or samahadi, or true enlightenment fell on to the funeral pyre of the cold hard truth. Buddhism means nothing. In Zen you might call this MU. MU me and MU you. But in this case MU is Buddhism itself. I fell into a quagmire of MU. I suppose you could say that at that moment I truthfully achieved enlightenment because I realized that neither Buddhism nor myself could save me. MU.
Enter the beginning of my dark soul of the damned. I was in despair. Neither the new age, nor Zen or Tibetan Buddhism, nor secular humanism could save me. I didn’t know what to do. Another voice entered my mind, the voice of the rotting corpse of Siddartha’s faith. It said, ” Seek the Pali Cannon. The Pali Cannon contains the oldest known written truth of Buddhism.” Well, far be it from me to disobey the voice of a rotting corpse, so off I went to Harvard University Library, which just had a borrowed copy of the Pali Cannon, in English.
MU. My despair only increased with each hour I spent reading the Cannon. My visions of Master Poe and Yoda began to toss themselves upon Buddhism’s cremation pyre and MU was the accelerant whipping up the flames.
I came back to California a Sad Boy. The New age turned out to be a fraud, Buddhism a steaming pile of Mu, I was never going to play in the NFL and I was no threat to Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen in the electric guitar arena. My Mount Holyoke woman wanted a fling with lesbianism and I no longer possessed the proper plumbing.
Over the next few years I felt lost spiritually. I finished college, decided teaching children was not for me, painted houses and chased young women hoping to catch a wife.
In 1986 I met “HER”. She was a good looking blond and appeared to fit the unrealistic fantasies I carried around from my days that old sexual predator from the Church of Religious science. What I did not know until much later and would not admit to myself until much, much later was that she was a sociopath and a corrupter.
Things started down hill with her around, but I was in love and had visions of marital bliss and blond children.
I hit bottom in 1988 when I landed in the torture cell of the Julicidos De Federal De La Republic De Los Estatos Unitos De Mexico, in Tijuana. In other words, I had degenerated in to a criminal and the Mexican Federal Police were showing me the error of my ways with a potent combination of electricity and water. Ouch. I still twitch occasionally when I think about it.
After several painful weeks filled with pain and fear of my mortal life and several weeks not getting mail in the old Tijuana jail, they threw me into one of the more notorious prisons in Mexico, La Mesa.
The day the guards pushed me into the yard of the prison to begin my vacation at Club Pinta I met Mark. Mark had been a hit man for a criminal organization in his prior life, had been a truly bad man, and looked like a killer. He walked up to me and I figured that he was going to kill me. What he did, however was take me in to his shack and ask the question, “ Did you know that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins?”
What a question. It was like a lightening bolt. I was stunned. I looked around Club Pinta, and had to admit to myself that perhaps I hadn’t done so well to end up in such a fine place. Some how a small purchased wooden cell shack with bars designed to keep the other prisoners out of your space instead of you in; a place where corruption, drugs, violence, gangs and the mafia run things, a bad place; I admitted that I was a sinner and I had rightfully earned my vacation in the Pinta. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
Shortly after my conversion, I was reading the Book of Romans, chapter eight. The answer I was seeking all those years, the answer as to how and why I couldn’t control myself and was miserable were answered. I had been a slave to sin. Finally my question was answered, not in a Zendo, not in the New Age, not in academia or secular humanism. The answer was in the blood of Jesus, shed for me, to forgive my sins and restore my relationship with him. Through the blood of Jesus I was freed from slavery to sin. Without the blood I am helpless.
In Club Pinta, in Mexico, in a place of corruption, death and danger, I became a free man.
