An Introduction

“Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands.” Psalm 66:1

It had started out as a true story. It hadn’t started badly, except for the foreboding that the writer felt, knowing as he did that no matter how pure his original intentions were, he would eventually succumb to either outright lies or exaggerations, the one for the purpose of hiding his crimes and the other merely as an attempt to be interesting.

But he intended to tell the truth. The first uncomfortable truth that he would try to bear was that he had wanted to be a writer ever since the first moment that words on a page had activated his imagination. He had known from an early age that words were magical—not because of the words themselves, but because of what happened in his mind to make sense of the words. Unlike movies—which used pictures and acting and music to tell stories—written words relied solely on the reader’s ability to create mental pictures that gave life to the story. A movie could show a beautiful sunset, but that was only one shot of one beautiful sunset, whereas a sunset in writing called to the readers mind any sunset the reader wanted to think about. When movies tried to tell the truth (IF any movie ever tried to tell the truth) it would be a very limited truth; the truth from only one camera angle, the truth with only one song playing on the soundtrack, a truth expressed by the performances of one or two actors in one or two scenes. Writing was different. Writing does not attempt to create truth. Writing merely tries to find the truth that already exists in the reader’s mind.

Even if the writer makes his best attempt at lying.

Movies never show you what is behind the screen. Writing can’t avoid showing you the things the writer doesn’t really want you to see. Writing is total psychological nakedness.

He had scarcely written two paragraphs and he was already sure that he had said too much.

He thought about continuing the fiction that he was writing a fictional story about a fictional character, but he knew that smart readers would be catching on by now and that he may as well go ahead and admit that the fictitious person he wrote about was not a made-up person at all. He was actually writing about himself.

So I let go of that first lie. Writing the truth isn’t as easy as you might think. All the lies and all the accustomed forms of lies are so readily available. It’s one of those conundrums or inherent contradictions. A story is a story: inherently untrue. A mask is a concealment of a face. Real truth needs no words. Real truth needs only to be experienced.

He knew this. He sat and wrote, knowing full well that if it were really true, it wouldn’t need a long explanation. Only lies need long explanations.

This is the long lie that I will be using to try to show you the truth that I know I can no longer hide. It’s up to you to catch me lying. For my own part I will merely alert you that it is a lie and that the truth underlies it in the same way that pure silences underlie sounds and in the same way that a blank screen underlies the projection of a motion picture.

Act 1, Scene 1: He remembers more about his infanthood than most people do and his preternaturally early memories serve as an explanation for the hurt inside him. Everyone he knows is happier than he is. He wonders how this can be and then he realizes that no one he knows has the memories he has. He remembers those early events and he notices that he was alone at the time. Oh, people were physically there, but his experiences were internal and he was completely alone inside. Someone shared his experiences, but he had those experiences completely by himself. One of those memories was something he came to think of as the dawn of his own awareness: his earliest memory.

I was less than two years old. I can’t remember how much less because age and number didn’t mean anything to me until after I turned 2. I could probably work it out retrospectively, but that would be cheating. Remembering retrospectively might tend to replace my actual memories with pseudo-memories that are less offensive to my adult sensibilities, so I keep the real memories as intact as I can by not trying to force them to make grown-up sense. The actual memories are my perceptions and thoughts as a child; seeing, feeling and thinking the way I saw, felt and thought while I was a child. I can trace my earliest memory back to a time when I was less than two years old and the things I remember from that time are the things that happened in a mind that was not yet two years old.

For many years, the memory of my second birthday was my earliest memory. It was an accessible memory because it had a strong linguistic and logical anchor: the number “2” began to have a meaning for me that day. My mother had taught me to make a sign for the number 2 by holding up two fingers. My favorite stuffed animal toy—maybe my only stuffed animal toy—was a rabbit that was bigger than I was. The rabbit slept with me and—since he was bigger than I was—he kept me from being afraid of strange noises and shadows in the night. When I held up my two fingers to show how many years old I was, the shape reminded me of the ears of my brave rabbit friend. On my second birthday, I was rabbit-ears old. That made it memorable for me and it was a tellable memory; something I could tell people about as an adult.

It took some concentration for me to find an earlier memory because my earlier memories didn’t have a linguistic anchor. My adult brain didn’t know how to retrieve my pre-linguistic memories. I knew that some people did “past-life regressions” by being hypnotized and even though I had no particular belief in reincarnation, I felt that there must be something to the process of remembering while hypnotized. It seemed to me that a human mind does store memories of every experience that a person has, but that it’s a matter of being able to recall a certain memory. Memories that are linked to words or sounds or images have a “file-path” in the brain; a series of thought-linkages that allow the person to access the memory. I knew that by trying to remember something that happened before I learned to speak, I was not going to be able to recall it the same way I could recall a “normal” memory.

I started with my second birthday and being “rabbit-ears old”. I relaxed my body and my mind, getting into a sort of meditative state, then I asked myself “What happened before I was rabbit-ears old?”

It was very nearly a total mental blockage. It wasn’t easy to recall an earlier memory. Well, in one way it was very difficult—meaning that it didn’t happen right away—but in another way it was very easy because all I had to do was relax my mind enough to let the memory come out. It was difficult to remember myself as an infant who didn’t think in logical terms, but once I got over the idea that I needed to think the way an adult thinks, it was pretty easy. My earlier memory was in images and feelings; in unprocessed, in-the-moment perceptions. Here I was, a grown person, letting my mind return to a time when I was not a grown person and I processed my perceptions of my surroundings in quite a different way.

And this was exactly what I was looking for. One of my main questions about myself as a young adult was who I was before my head got filled with ideas that were not my own ideas. Who was I before the world taught me what to think and how to think? What was the foundation of my awareness before the world came crashing in upon me? Before the filters of skepticism, doubt and distrust covered my eyes, before I learned to be afraid of strangers, before I learned that people could be cruel and selfish, before I began to realize that the world was a big place full of beauty and ugliness, love and hate, differing points of view that led people to sometimes kill one another, hidden motives, emotional manipulations, the idea that some people are good and others aren’t; before I even knew that there was any difference or separation between “me” and the world outside of “me”—who was I? And how did the world look to me? By pursuing my earliest possible memory, I was trying to find the pure, unspoiled place in my soul.

He was lying on his back on the sofa in the living room of a small house in a small town in Central California. It was a house for poor people, in a poor person’s neighborhood, in a town no one knows. He didn’t know he was a poor person’s child. To him, the place he was laying was just “the couch” and it was in a place that was merely “the house”.

As he lay there, he listened to the voice of Mom, who was alternately speaking to him (“you just wait right there”) and singing a gospel song:

“Low in the grave He lay, Jesus my Savior,

Waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose,

With a mighty triumph o’er His foes,

He arose a Victor from the dark domain,

And He lives forever, with His saints to reign.

He arose!

He arose!

Hallelujah! Christ arose!…”

He loved hearing Mom’s singing even though he couldn’t be sure who she was singing to. It seemed like she might be singing to him—her baby—but then it also seemed like she was singing to herself—to keep her spirits up. And she was also singing to someone whose name was either God or Jesus or Lord. As far as he could tell, when Mom sang, the whole world was filled with music. Music made everything okay. Later in life, he would be unable to remember a time when music didn’t have a profound effect on him; the effect of making him feel as though everything would be okay.

In Mom’s voice—a voice that he would later come to consider a very ordinary and commonplace sort of voice, but with the sort of genuine beauty that can only come from that which is unaware of its own beauty—the child discovered music. He would go on to make many discoveries, including the discovery that it was music that gave power to his idea of religion; that if not for the music—the singing of simple songs by ordinary voices and the songs that transformed those ordinary voices into glorious music—he would never have felt an emotional connection to religion at all. It had always been the music that had hooked him and this moment as he lay on the sofa at the center of the totality of his small universe was the first moment he became aware of his deep love of music.

The writer paused to review what he had just written. It seemed to be the true story he wanted to tell, but he was at a loss for an explanation of why this was the story. He could tell that he wanted to say something about remembering beyond normal memory, but he didn’t know how any reader would be able to see that the memory was true. He could have made it all up, in the same way that writers always make up stories to tell. In the second place, he could be telling a memory that he truly had, but that he had fooled himself into believing in exactly the same way that people fooled themselves with past-life “memories”. There was nothing to prove that the story had any truth-value at all.

There is nothing in any story to prove a truth-value except corroboration by a separate source. Apart from the rare cases where two unaffiliated writers independently tell the same story with the same details, no story ever has any proof.

To make matters worse, even some corroborated stories were obviously fictional—mere repeated myths, only repeated by different storytellers because the stories are good stories, not because they are true stories.

There would be no corroboration for this story. No one else was there: just a baby and a mother and they each experienced the same moment in their separate ways. Not even Mom could tell this story the same way. There was no way to escape the fact that the story was one person’s story. There was no way to declare it true.

Yet, this was the challenge. This was why the writer was a writer: because of the throwing-around of “truth”; because of the debates about truth; because people fought and died under the banner of truth and because of the people who were put to death because someone was so certain that untrue words were spoken and that a liar should not be allowed to live. He wrote because truth seemed vitally important to so many people and he knew that truth was important to him and still he could discover no way to “prove” any truth objectively.

He could tell truth, but he couldn’t make anyone hear it. He could make music, but he couldn’t be sure if anyone would hear music or just noise. He could sense that he was a real person living a real life in a real world and he couldn’t prove any of it.

That was a problem. If you can’t prove reality, the unreal has just as much validity as the real. If you can’t prove that what exists actually exists, hallucinations and fictions are just as valid as any real thing. This was in fact a major problem. Real things can be made to look just like lies and lies can be made to look just like real things. “True story” began to seem like an oxymoron and the writer began to feel like a fictional character in his own life, ineffectually asserting “but it was REAL!”

Is there anyone out there? Can you hear me?

Before the baby knew he was a baby, before he knew he was a he, before he knew to be afraid of the possibility that some unknown imaginary monster might be lurking under his bed or that an equally unknown-but-very-real criminal fiend might be invading his home as he slept, before he knew anything at all, he knew that he loved music and that music came from Mom. Sensing that what came from Mom might be able to come from Baby, he found his voice, opened his mouth and began to sing the old gospel tune. It wasn’t an old tune at that moment. Even if it had been sung by countless others for hundreds or thousands of years, when he sang it, it was as fresh as the breath in a baby’s lungs.

So he sang. His voice didn’t have the quality or the control of Mom’s voice, but the fact that the vibrations of the notes were coming from the inside of his own head rather than outside—that he was hearing himself sing for the first time—gave the experience a power he had never known before. Years later, he would try to write about the experience and words would fail him. He had no words for it at the time—as a baby—and as an adult, he resisted his own attempt to retroactively conjure words for it.

It couldn’t have been the first time he had ever heard music. Mom sang all the time. But as far as he could tell, it was the first time that music had come from inside of him.

He wasn’t aware of being diaper-less as he lay on the couch. It hadn’t registered on his mind (just then in the process of becoming an aware mind) that he was in the middle of a diaper change. He didn’t realize that he was peeing on himself and on the couch as he lay there discovering that he could sing. Mom brought those facts to his attention a little later, slightly after the fact.

“You’re singing!” said Mom enthusiastically as she re-entered the room where her baby awaited the installation of a fresh diaper, “and you wet all over the sofa,” she continued as her enthusiasm changed to disappointment.

That was the moment when I first noticed that there was a world outside of myself that was separate from my inner self. My inner self had just had a triumph. My outer self had just peed all over the couch and was in trouble with Mom.

This story is of course completely true. If it was fictional, I’d have made it more interesting.

He was the baby and he was the adult looking back at being a baby and he was the writer trying to tell the story that was his earliest memory, earlier than any normal sort of memory, significant because of its lack of adornment or excuse. In that moment, the mind of an infant became aware of itself, knowing itself as separate from every other thing.

Mom swatted the baby’s wet bottom lightly as a mild reproach to the unacceptable sans-diaper urination. The baby began to cry, but the crying was not because of any physical pain caused by the gentle swatting of its bottom. The baby cried because it knew that its mother was disappointed.

In that moment, I knew that sadness could interrupt the greatest triumph and that I was one thing on the inside while being an entirely other thing on the outside. For the rest of my life, I have been drawn to music and I have carried a deep sadness and shame. I’ve made every possible effort to understand how I interact with my world and I have found very little certainty about anything.

My personal history of awareness started with me noticing that I did not gain the approval of authority figures even if I happened to deeply love them. I became aware upon noticing that I could sing, but that I would also pee.

With the exception of sleeping each night, I have remained continually aware throughout the rest of my life, never really losing consciousness at any time along the way; never having the relief of blacking out as some people do from drinking too much. Oh, I’ve tried to drink too much to blot it all out, but I’ve never managed to find the comforting oblivion of passing out. I am cursed with awareness. I still sing. I have acquired skill in bladder control, at least for the time being. In some future time, I will probably go back to peeing my pants while I sing. Maybe by then, my memory won’t be as good as it now and I’ll sing enthusiastically but incoherently.

But for the time being, all of my memories are still there: strangely mixed feelings, absurd situations, experiences that don’t make enough sense, moments of profound insight and moments of excruciating boredom. It’s all still there and along with it, the desire to tell.
But can I give you the desire to hear?

Forget for a moment that I seem to be asking you to hear me. Can I spark your desire to listen to yourself and to listen to the world in such a way that you can know truth?

What will follow in this blog will be a course in meditation, philosophy and living authentically. My classroom is my life. I seek nothing more than to share what I have learned through the living of a long, strange, aware life.

I’m not a role model or a guru—in fact I find myself to be quite ordinary, so I’m fairly confident that any amazing thing that I can find inside myself can be easily found by others in the contexts of their own lives. I’m saying that anyone who is willing to honestly look is a person who can honestly see.

Lesson one has been that truth may not always be pretty, but truth is always true whether it’s easy to look at or not.

And I’ve just created a place where a writer and a reader can have open eyes, minds and hearts.

Therein, truth can be true.

Welcome.
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