Prime Time (51 page)

Okay, so my “true nature” turns out to be a ripple in the cosmic flow. In my midlife this would have been a downright uncomfortable proposition to accept—
Don’t tell me that my Workout and all those new muscles we’re creating are just energy waves, or that my Oscars are only abstractions!
But now, why not? I’m in my seventies. The wind isn’t at my back anymore; it’s right in my face. Going with the flow is actually a rather comforting notion. The more I can wrap my “mind” around this cosmic view, the more comfortable I’ll be, when the “end” comes, stepping away from being an abstraction and becoming what I actually am—part of the cosmic energy flow. As Buddhists often say, “No thing–ness, or nothingness, is more real than thingness.”

Still, why does this laptop I’m writing on seem so solid and my dog lying against my thigh so warm?

Bohm suggests that we couldn’t get much accomplished in the practical reality of our day-to-day lives if we lived in the constant awareness of the multidimensional reality of ever-changing, interacting fields. So we’ve turned the illusion of a stable, fragmented, atom-based-building-block manifest world into the way things are, the ultimate truth. We’ve made the abstraction into our reality. And mirroring the old scientific view of that reality, a mechanistic culture of individualism, of us and them, of us versus nature, has come into being. What would happen if we were able to accept the manifest abstraction that we call reality as a practical way to get things done (do the laundry, board a plane, fall in love and have sex with a kindred abstraction) while simultaneously holding the awareness that on a deeper, indefinable level, we are all one—not just figuratively but literally?

Who knows if nuns and monks who spend their lives in prayer or yogis who spend theirs in meditation are intuitively tuned in to the cosmic reality. More and more of them are working with scientists to reveal the impact their mindfulness has on the “real” world.

We don’t all have to go to a sanctuary to spend eight days in silent meditation. But we can seek times of solitude as well as activities that allow us to go inward: yoga, tai chi, life review, gardening, walking in nature, painting, meditating, poetry, prayer. These and other contemplative activities let us become permeable to the wisdom we all possess, to the reality of
inter
dependence instead of individualism, to the inevitability of our own death alongside the infinite flow of energy that is also us.

I want to close this chapter by quoting the final portion of “Monet Refuses the Operation,” by Lisel Mueller, the poem I cited in
Chapter 1
:

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it,

to paint the speed of light!

Our weighed shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

CHAPTER 22

Full Tilt to the End

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

—GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ,
Love in the Time of Cholera

T
HE PHILOSOPHER AND PSYCHOLOGIST DR. JEAN HOUSTON TELLS this story about a series of life-altering encounters she had as a young girl:

When I was fourteen years old my parents got divorced, and I was just grief-stricken about it. I took to running down Park Avenue, late for school—I would run from my grief. And one day I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. I picked him up and he said to me in a French accent, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”

I said, “Yes sir, looks that way.”

He said, “Well, bon voyage!”

I said, “Bon voyage.” And I ran to school. The following week I was walking my fox terrier, Champ, and I saw the old man coming out of a building. I lived at 86th, just off of Park Avenue, and the old man lived somewhere around 84th and Park.

He said to me, “Ah, my friend the runner, you have a fox terrier. Where are you going?”

“Well sir, I take Champ to Central Park after school. I just think about things.”

“I will go with you sometime, okay?”

I said, “Well, sure.”

“I will take my constitutional.”

Now he was something. He had no self-consciousness at all. He had leaky margins with the world. He had a long French name but he asked me to call him by the first part of it, which to my American ears sounded like “Mr. Tayer.” So I called him Mr. Tayer. We walked for about a year and a half, off and on, mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would suddenly fall to the ground and look at a caterpillar: “Oh, Jean, look at the caterpillar! Ah, moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar. Can you do that?”

“Very easily, Mr. Tayer.” I mean, here I was, a fourteen-year-old girl nearly six feet tall with red dots on my face—I felt like a caterpillar!

He said, “What are you when you finally become a
papillon,
a butterfly? What is the butterfly of Jean?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Tayer!”

“Yes, you know, you know. I know you know. Now, what are you transforming into?”

“Well, I think when I grow up I’ll fly all over the world, and maybe I’ll help people.”

“Ah! Bon, bon, bon.” And he’d say, “Oh, Jean, lean into the wind!” There are these strong winds off of Central Park. “Ah, Jean, smell the wind! Same wind once went through Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ felt this?”

“Yes. Oh, Marie Antoinette, here she comes! Genghis Khan, not so good. Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc! Be filled with Jeanne d’Arc! Be filled with the tides of history!” We had all these wonderful games about life: “Jean, look at the clouds, God’s calligraphy in the sky!”

He would suddenly stop and look at you, and he would giggle and you would giggle, and he’d giggle and you’d giggle, and then he would look at you laughing and laughing as if you were the cluttered house that hid the Holy One. I would go home and tell my mother, “Mother, I met my old man again and when I’m with him I leave my littleness behind.”

Toward the end of our walk together one day, he stopped suddenly and he turned to me and said, “Jean, what to you is the most fascinating question?”

And I said, “It’s about history, Mr. Tayer, and destiny, too. How can we take the right path in history so that we even have a destiny? My friends at school all talk about the H-bomb, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to be twenty-one years old. Mr. Tayer, you always talk about the future of man as if we had a future; I want to know what we have to do to keep that future coming.”

He said, “We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?”

He said—and this is exactly what he said; I was taking notes because I knew I was in the presence of greatness—“We are being called into metamorphosis, into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves. It is necessary that we increase that portion. But do not think for one minute, Jean, that we are alone in making that possible. We are part of a cosmic evolutionary movement that inspires us to unite with God. This is the lightning flash for all our potentialities. This is the great originating cause of all our shifts and changes. Without it there is nothing but struggle and decline.”

And I said to him, “What do you call it? I’ve never heard of it. Can something as great as that even have a name?”

“You are right,” he said. “It is impossible to name.”

“Well, try to name it, Mr. Tayer. I’ve heard that once a thing is named, you can begin to work with it.”

He seemed amused and he said, “I’ll try.” And then he said, “It is the demand of the universe for the birth of the ultra-human. It is the rising of a new form of psychic energy in which the very depths of loving within you are combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream.”

I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but I nodded sagely, and I said I would ponder these things, and he said he would also. One day toward the end of our time together—this was actually the last day that I ever saw him—Mr. Tayer began talking to me about the lure of becoming, a phrase that then became a part of my language. And also about how we humans are part of an evolutionary process in which we are being drawn toward something—which he called the “Omega point”—full of evolution. He told me that he believed that physical and spiritual energy was always flowing out from the Omega point and empowering us as well as leading us forward through love and illumination. And it was then that I asked him my ultimate question, the one that I must say has continued to haunt me all the days of my life: “What do you believe it’s all about, Mr. Tayer?” His answer is enshrined in my heart. He started by saying,
“Je crois”
—I believe. “I believe that the universe is in evolution. I believe that the evolution is toward spirit. I believe that spirit fulfills itself in a personal God.”

“And what do you believe about yourself, Mr. Tayer?”

He said, “I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future.”

It was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I had brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah! Escargot!” he said, and then he began to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour about spirals and nature and art, snail shells and galaxies, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral—which later became a symbol of my work—and the Rose Window and the convolutions of the brain, the whirl of flowers and the circulation of the heart’s blood. It was all taken up in a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter, “It’s all a spiral of becoming, Jean!” Then he looked away, and he seemed to be seeing into the future and he said, “Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world. But they cannot go directly.” He used the French word,
directement.
“You have to go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then that the newest in the field of mind will awaken and we will rebuild the earth.” And then he said to me, “Jean, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love.” Those were the words that he said to me. Then he said,
“Au revoir,
Jean.”

“Au revoir,
Mr. Tayer! I’ll see you on Tuesday!”

And Tuesday came and I brought Champ, and Champ whimpered; he seemed to know something. And my old man never came. Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. Eight weeks I waited and he never came again, because it turned out he had died on that Sunday in 1955.

Years later, somebody gave me a book without a cover called
The Phenomenon of Man.
And when I began to read it, I said, “My God! That’s my pal, that’s . . . oh my goodness . . .” And I went to my friend and asked, “Have you got the cover to the book?” And she gave it to me and I flipped it over and, of course, there was my old man. No forgetting that face! Mr. Tayer had been Teilhard de Chardin.