It is 1971 and I have been living in Isfahan, Iran, the storied midpoint of the famous Silk Road stretching from Peking (now Beijing) to Constantinople (now Istanbul). The Peace Corps guys, charged with teaching the USA-protected Iranian military how to repair war-surplus American jeeps, were running the highly lucrative hashish trade from Afghanistan into Europe. The British Embassy guys were into Gurdjieff and opium. The intelligentsia were quietly buying their government grade opium from the lower class that had registered as opium addicts and were given monthly elegant Godiva Chocolate-style boxes of beautifully wrapped and stamped high-grade opium. The counter government “students” (remember Jimmy Carter and the Canadian film crew saviors) always hid behind fake first names only and would regularly disappear overnight at the hands of the secret police Savak. What can I say? It was the times.
As a traditional Canadian farm boy with a Roman Catholic upbringing and a psychedelic Space Odyssey adventure together pointed me to the yogic approach to spirituality. I didn’t want priests and communion. I didn’t want the uninformed psychedelic circus playground. The Middle East pointed to the subcontinent and the legendary history of India and the Himalayas was absolutely irresistible. I wanted to see God face to face. Get me a guru and get it fast.
By 1972 (the years seemed soooooooo long back then), I found myself in a heavy war-surplus mummy sleeping bag in an ashram staring with elation at the star-packed skies in the foothills of the Himalayas of northern India. Romantically, I imagined that I had finally picked up where I had left off in my past life. I felt like I could fly… and part of me kind of thought I might. Chalk that up to a massive confusion as to what I expected now that I was entering into the hallowed tradition of yogic meditation. I was young, naïve, and fully primed. Cut me some slack. You had to be there in the time to understand. This was way, way before the internet. You had to book a long-distance phone call at a nearby hotel and a round-trip letter would take about three weeks. When you were on the other side of the planet, you were REALLY far from home.
Eventually, I moved back to Canada and then to the USA and for years I “sat in meditation” and traveled to help in other ashrams and assist in initiation sessions. I developed discipline and explored devotion without actually realizing that I had imported much of my “us/them” foolishness from my early Roman Catholicism into this new exotic lifestyle. My childhood conviction that “my religion goes to heaven and yours goes to hell” mentality morphed into “my guru can beat up your guru” mindset. So much to learn but, truthfully, so much to unlearn. I suppose the “saving grace” in all of that was my determination to refine and develop a more pure consciousness.
Not surprisingly, over time, just as I had drifted out of “being Catholic”, I also found my commitment to the Guru evaporating like a slow, almost invisible separation in a marriage and realizing one day that it was a divorce. Then there were no more rules or mental obligations. My longing for the “sacred” never ceased and, there I was, free to “spiritually date” again. Kind of simultaneously relieved and lost all at the same time. Which led me very cautiously into a Korean form of Taoism with another teacher and a whole new style of practice. Learn. Let go. Learn. Let go. Learn. Let go.
Having spent 10 years of two hours a day in a certain meditation style, flipping into Korean language chanting with associated structured breathing was a mind-bender for me. I figured there are “many roads to Rome,” I slowly adapted to the practice. Much of the challenge in all of this (which still remains to this very day) is to clarify “the goal” or “target” of this or any “spiritual practice.” I know part of my psyche was still imagining some sort of “divine psychedelic” major WOW blissful release… and to stay there in Nirvana until the heavens reabsorbed me… or something like that. The expected “result” was actually never very clear. It remained some version of an “altered state of consciousness” (a term from Charles Tart) or a “non-ordinary state” or maybe some type of “non-drug psychedelic trip” or a sudden visit to heaven or the taste of Cosmic Consciousness (to go way back to Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902), a Canadian psychiatrist) or even some Variety of Religious Experience (William James). You must keep in mind that the bulk of all of these attempts took place before the internet and information was passed on book by book and physical gatherings between friends and other “seekers.”
Another 10 years passed and after many moons, including many isolated mountain meditation retreats hidden away in a tent for months at a time… a psychic earthquake pushed me over the edge and into a deep crisis of meaning and a profound existential fatigue. The “goal” was a distant horizon that seemingly kept moving away as I got closer. And the realization that my “effort” was never going to transform into realization. Sitting on a mountain slope, I came the closest to my “heart’s true desire” than at any time before. It was the first real prayer of my life… no words… just a scream for help. And that’s how, a few months later, I ended up weeping in the lap of my Tibetan Dzogchen teacher.
Dzogchen is one of the few matured “non-dual” traditions that has made it with an intact lineage into our modern times. Once a very guarded and secretive practice, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the forced diaspora of qualified Tibetan lamas pushed Dzogchen out into the world. I have been extremely fortunate to have been taken as a “private student” of a highly respected Dzogchen teacher and have been absorbing the non-dual approach for the past 30 years. Dzogchen, like other non-dual traditions, is tricky stuff and can easily tantalize one with a super cool philosophy that can masquerade as the “real thing.” Its utter simplicity sounds great, but it is also precisely the challenge of disarming simplicity that makes it not easy. Why? Because we are deeply habituated in our non-stop complex intellectualization.
Over all of these many decades, modern neuroscience has been slowly developing insights involving the functions of our physical brain. These insights are building perspectives that allow us to align physical attributes with the “black box” of the Mind. Is it possible that the advances in neuroscience can offer a better understanding of our spiritual traditions? Some people have the opinion that science is the “enemy” of spirituality and that “God is dead” and just an understandable but failed superstition. Others see quite the opposite and that science and spirituality are complements and “two sides of the same coin.” I find myself among those that see flipping the same complementary coin. And this perspective is innate to the core design of the NeuroVIZR experience. More about that next time!
Words From the Founder
Riding the Elevator in My Own Mind