Some Learnings from Life – Sunday the 1^st of July 2025

As I was revising my memoir, Tales of an Urban Mystic, I took out a few stories I’d like to share with you, that may help as you look out at the world, and in to your Self.

o

About fifty years ago when I was living in New York a Tibetan Buddhist teacher I was studying with was criticized by someone in our group when he mentioned that he ate meat for lunch. The student insisted that he had to be a vegetarian, and our teacher replied, “If you listen carefully, you can hear a carrot screaming when it’s pulled from the ground.” And in the past few years, science has confirmed that.

o

Another time our teacher smacked and killed a fly that was circling over his head, a different student criticized him, and he said to us, “Don’t worry about it. They reincarnate instantly.”

o

One day when I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I was meditating and thinking about my life and regretting the choice of parents I made when I came back this time. I asked, “Why? What is this all about?” and was shown a scene of two beautiful mountain peaks rising up above dense clouds. Then I was told that one peak was the soul of my father in this life, the other was the soul of my mother. Then slowly the clouds evaporated, and I could see the mountains all the way to the ground. One was logged and burned, the other strip-mined, with a dirty smoggy city at the bottom. And I was told – no idea by who – that we choose our parents for their souls, their mountain peaks, then come into the world where they are less than shining, as we all are, and that when we’re struggling with our parents, partners, anyone, it’s helpful and healing to try to see them from a soul level – and to do the same with ourselves, to see us from both perspectives – glorious mountain peak and……

o

I loved walking to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, to wander, sit, look at cute guys, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Manhattan skyline across the river. The walk usually took me around an hour, up Flatbush Avenue, but one day something happened to me that never happened before, and has never happened again.

As I walked down my block and turned the corner onto Eight Avenue I passed three little girls jumping rope. I stepped closer to the curb to give them more room, and then something amazing happened. Time began to pulsate. To turn off and on again. My walk, my pace, remained the same – but one moment the two girls swinging the rope were in motion, and the little girl jumping was jumping – and then they froze for a few seconds. I’m amazed to this very day – and I was not drunk or on any kind of drug – that for a few seconds the girl jumping over the rope was frozen in the air, as were the girls swinging the rope, arms and bodies frozen. Every car and bus around me stopped, the clouds moving overhead, the pigeons flying, all stopped. For two or three seconds – every single thing around me stopped – but me! I kept walking, at my regular pace. And then, after a few seconds, time started again in the world, the girl jumped, the others twirled their rope, for a couple of seconds, and then – everything around me froze again. Everything but me.

As I continued on my way, I noticed that my watch and the gigantic clock on the tower I passed near the train station stopped, started, stopped, started, as did all the world around me. But I continued on till I got to the Promenade, when time and the world around me went back to its normal continuous flow. My watch told me that a walk that usually took me close to an hour took me around twenty minutes, and to this day I wonder – what did those little girls see as I walked past? A blur? A fuzz? What did the drivers, the other pedestrians, the birds, the squirrels, what did they all see as I walked past them? And to this day I wonder – what does this tell me, tell us, about the nature of reality? Ben says to consider that perhaps what seems to us a continuous flow – isn’t really. That perhaps time and the world as we know it is always turning on and off, like a movie that’s turned on and off and on and off and on and off, only our brains turn on and off too, so that we experience everything as a continuous flow. When perhaps it ain’t.

o

In the 1980s a friend in Brooklyn, Joan Sexton, bought the original painting of Robert Lentz’s icon, Christ Sophia. She met him on a retreat and fell in love with his Jesus painted as a dark-skinned Bedouin woman. He told her that in certain Eastern Orthodox traditions the second person of the trinity is considered female in essence, Chochmah in Hebrew, Sophia, Wisdom, and male in manifestation, as Jesus. Joan invited me to see the icon, in a small upstairs room in her brownstone that she turned into a chapel. The icon was sitting on an easel in the far corner, with a small loveseat across from it at an angle in the middle of the room. Joan and I were chatting as she guided me around the couch to the easel, then stepped back, and I turned to face the icon. I felt a force surging out of it so powerful that I was thrust back into the couch behind me. Breathless, amazed, for nothing like that had ever happened to me before, I sat there in silence, awed by the presence of something greater than myself.

o

Many years later I was walking home from work in San Francisco, and as I came down Church Street a young man turned the corner, carrying a duffle bag over one shoulder and dragging a single-bed mattress behind him. He and his clothes looked like they hadn’t been washed in ages, and when he saw me he started to scream, “I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!” I panicked and turned to dart between two parked cars into the street, grateful that he was moving slowly because of what he was carrying. As I moved toward the space between the two cars everything changed, and for about three seconds I found myself seeing him from a soul perspective – and I knew that he had been raised in a rich suburban Southern white family, with the expectation that he marry, have children, live in a great big house himself and have a very successful career. Instead, he was filthy, living on the street, gay, drugged – and in a state of joyous ecstasy for all the ways in which he had rejected the repressive ways in which he’d been raised.

o

Recently I was sitting with my doctor, both of us in our Covid masks in her little Berkeley office. When I said to her, “So many lovers and friends of mine died of AIDS that I didn’t expect to live to be an old man,” she leaned closer and said, “You aren’t old. You’re ancient,” with a familiar twinkle in her eyes. Then she explained. “For most of human history the average life span was 35 to 40 years, so being in your 70s makes you ancient.” Having gone off to college intending to become an archaeologist, I like being ancient.