“You see what you want to see.
You hear what you want to hear.”

-The Rock Man from The Point

In February 1971 I happened upon The Point by the artist Harry Nielson. I was 16 years old at the time. I got up from the couch that night to flip channels on the TV in the den and there it was. It was a lucky night for me and countless others. The Point was an animated story about a boy named Oblio who was born with a round head in a village of pointed ones. Because he was different, the evil-minded Count, who had the pointiest head of all, grew very angry after Oblio and his dog Arrow beat his son in a game of triangles. The Count then made the case that the “round headed boy” should be banished. The King, with great reluctance, agreed and Oblio and his dog Arrow were sent to the Pointless Forest.

So young Oblio heads off on the hero’s journey, meeting magical characters along the way, and he learns that “you don’t have to have a point to have a point.” It doesn’t take him very long and he returns to the village. The hero brings home the knowledge that everything indeed has a point and The King and the people agree. The Count, his son, and everyone else lose their pointed heads while Oblio gains one. The people rejoiced and the Count, whose attachment to his point and his power is great, sleeks off never to be heard from again. It was a wonderful story, with beautiful images and Nielson’s marvelous original sound track.

Being 16 years old was a transitional time for me. I woke up out of my teenage slumber and became “aware.” This was happening to many young people around my age at that time. A wave of consciousness had swelled and some of us, without knowing how, caught the wave and were on the crest and flying. The Point had come at the right moment. It acted as a touchstone which propelled and lifted me up. There would be many such touchstones to come. For me catching this wave of awareness translated into moving beyond my family and neighborhood identity and into a larger feeling of being connected with a much larger group. I began to read more and play sports less. I read poetry, listened to new music, became interested in the great books and in social justice. I felt very alive. That summer of 71 I grew my hair longer and moved with two friends to a cottage in Beach Haven, NJ, working nights as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant and surfing in the morning. Rode my bike everywhere. I grew intensely curious about the world around me and wanted to understand it all. It was marvelous! That feeling, that energy, grew in me for many years and it shaped who I became.

My peers and other people like my teachers approached me differently in my senior year. They asked me questions in class and let me explore various interests. I went from a C student to an A student. I developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge. I graduated from high school in 1972 and went to Belknap College in Centre Harbor, New Hampshire. Belknap was “a hippie college,” with 300 or so free spirits. I fit right in and quickly adapted to living without the restrictions of home, societal norms, and the rules of public high school with its dress codes and punitive nature. Feeling liberated and emboldened I was ready to explore new worlds.

In 1974 my explorations discovered Transcendental Meditation, which I then started and never stopped; a year and a half after that, I met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For me it was love at first sight as he filled me with light and happiness. Maharishi said, “The world is as we are.” I think what he meant was that we can only see the world through the filters of our consciousness. If we are happy and positive then we see the world in that light. If we are depressed and troubled the whole world reflects that back to us. Maharishi also reminded us that whatever we put our attention on grows stronger in our life. If we think or dwell on negative things, negativity grows within. We have that choice to create our lives through cultivating our power of attention. What this means is that the six billion people on the planet have each created their own reality or point of view. Each of us shares parts of our reality with others, be they family, friends, or tribal groups and when we meet these people we feel at home. People outside this group, people living with a different set of beliefs, points of view or reality, we may not relate to and our interest and attention will not flow to them.

Even with this, we can grow into appreciation that we are all human beings and experience the same emotions, like love, happiness, anger, and despair. As humans we also share the same needs, such as air to breath, and food and water to drink. We need clothes and shelter. And we can expand from this to embrace all of Life. We can see that every creature, be it insects, reptiles, fish, birds or mammals, are expressions of Life and that we share Life with them. We can still go further in finding connection. We can see that there is a universal awareness or consciousness and that every one of us embodies that awareness and expresses it with our every thought and movement. This sharing of Life and Consciousness is what brings us to appreciating the sacred wisdom that has been passed down from generation to generation. “E Pluralist Unum”, or “one from many”. It’s the unity and the diversity of Life that brings joys and sorrows. The unity binds us in oneness and the diversity brings us the richness of experience.

Each of us needs to discover who we are and how to connect back to wholeness. This is the path we’re on. It’s the perennial path. It’s the cosmic journey. Walt Whitman put it this way in his poem, “Song of the Open Road”:

To know the universe as a road, many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments — all that
was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe,
falls into niches or corners before the procession
of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

Wherever you find yourself, living in the same house where you were born or living two continents away, universal themes abound. Don’t get stuck in any one theme, but explore it and enjoy it and then transcend it and explore the next. Pay your bills, keep being responsible and upright. But wherever you are, transcend. Read, travel, explore, be curious, and be in love with yourself and everyone around you. Don’t just smell the flowers but grow them. Make your world beautiful.

And most importantly, when you’re tired, rest. Enjoyment disappears when we’re tired. Appreciation dims when we overdo it. Life is meant to be lived fully and thoroughly enjoyed.

Don’t let life become a burden. Talk to someone. Learn TM and practice it twice a day. Transcending thought is different than observing thoughts. Do some yoga. Take a walk in the woods or on the beach. Get up early and see the sunrise. Have lunch with a friend. Say hi to the person sitting next to you on the bus. Put your iPhone away. Take your noise cancelling headphones off and stow them in your bag. Connect with everyone with a smile, a nod, or a word. Let Life live you. Let Love be the currency you live on. I promise you, do all of this and you will be floating in waves of fulfillment and bliss.

For your enjoyment checkout the link below the Rock Man meeting Oblio and Arrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ThccaxWmk

“Golden slumbers,
Fill your eyes
Smiles await you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling
Do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby.”      

– Paul McCartney, John Lennon

“Golden Slumbers,” Abbey Road

I don’t know about you, but if I’m tired I can’t do anything well. Writing is out, seeing friends is out, and sometimes even talking to my family is out. If I get overly tired I look for a quiet spot to nap, meditate, or just become a recluse for a while.

Certainly this is a function of aging, but the model of aging that impressed my young mind was of my Irish Nana, who only slept 4-5 hours a night and took a 20-30 minute nap around 4:30 in the late afternoon after coming home from work. When she woke up she made dinner and was up until midnight or later. I grew up thinking that at some point I wouldn’t need the eight hours I spent sleeping. What my Irish Nana and I have in common is a 20-minute nap in the late afternoon. After that wonderful repose, I practice my Transcendental Meditation technique for a deeper rest and Samadhi.

Later as a 20-year old, I learned that my spiritual teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, also only slept four hours each night. Actually he didn’t sleep, not the way we think of it; he witnessed his sleep, meaning that he maintained inner wakefulness while he slept. This witnessing of sleeping, waking, and dreaming is a characteristic of Cosmic Consciousness and higher states of consciousness. Sometimes while Maharishi ‘slept’ people read to him. At a meditation retreat one such person told us that when he first started reading to Maharishi while Maharishi ‘slept’, he didn’t understand what was expected of him. Was he supposed to read to Maharishi until he fell asleep and then quietly close the book and tip-toe out? Evidently not, for when the reader stopped reading, Maharishi ‘woke up’ and said, “Continue reading.” So the reader started reading again. As Maharishi’s head began to fall to his chest and his breathing changed to indicate he was asleep, the person again stopped reading and closed the book. Maharishi with eyes closed said, “Please continue.” After that the reader continued reading for the next few hours. When Maharishi finally woke up, the man told us that to his astonishment Maharishi wanted to discuss the book and even asked some questions! Now that’s a great example of making use of every minute of time!

Alas, I’m not there. I have had experiences of witnessing sleep. Sometimes it happens while I’m napping and sometimes it happens an hour before the sun rises. But mostly I sleep long and deep. Not only do I need it, I love it, or more accurately I love how I feel when I awaken. To be fully rested makes me feel like a kid again. It makes me feel fully alive and wide-awake.

And yet for many years I didn’t have time or more importantly I didn’t make time to be fully rested. I practiced my Transcendental Meditation and advanced techniques twice a day and that helped keep me afloat. But even with that I didn’t rest enough. I pushed myself too hard and in too many directions. Having your own business will do that. When I was tired in the late afternoon, I drank coffee. Loved coffee. Must keep going, must keep all those plates spinning in the air. Despite my efforts to stay energized, over a period of years I slowly grew tired. And instead of sleeping less I slept more.

When I was in New Delhi, India in 1980 with Maharishi and three thousand other meditators and TM teachers on the Vedic Science course, someone asked Maharishi what the priority should be for meditators. Maharishi considered the question and then said, and I paraphrase, ‘First priority is sleep. If we are not fully rested then our experiences in meditation will not be clear and our TM Siddhi practice will not yield the results we seek. Second priority is being regular in our TM and Siddhi program. Being regular brings tremendous benefits and makes our activities successful. Third priority is our business. Being successful in business brings joy and support for our family. Fourth priority is family. We do all that we need to do to take care of our family. Fifth priority is the TM Movement. If we have any time after taking care of the four previous priorities, then we help the Movement where and when we can.’

I was surprised to hear Maharishi say, ‘Sleep is the first priority.” But of course it made sense and much more sense as the years passed. Our physical bodies need rest to repair and reorganize this complex brain physiology. Lack of proper rest not only makes us grumpy but also creates wear and tear. Like Humpty Dumpty going over a wall, we too can find ourselves beyond repair at some point. Avoid being Humpty Dumpty, especially if you want to live a creative life. If you want to live an enlightened life that path is one of balance and moderation. Rest and activity is the formula. Don’t over do it and become exhausted.

For your well-being, health, and longevity I urge you to take more rest, not less. Take a nap, instead of going for that late afternoon run. Exercise in the morning. Go to bed earlier and skip the 11o’clock news. Make sure you get eight hours of sleep. Studies show it’s good for your brain and your memory. In order to live a creative full life we must be rested and not running on adrenaline and caffeine. To love fully and appreciate those around us, we must be rested. To be our natural creative and happy selves good rest is needed. I promise if you take this advice to heart, you will thank me later. Activity in the pursuit of happiness is overrated. Being deeply rested creates the ground for a natural state of joy and appreciation. Transcending with the Transcendental Meditation technique twice a day is also a big plus. Helps to keep one at your happy, creative best.

Okay, time for my nap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First of all, Jerry Jarvis and Norman O. Brown have never met. If the question had been asked Brown would not have had the foggiest notion who Jerry Jarvis was. And Jerry would probably say, “Norman who??” For me, however, the two men are explicitly linked.

I had received my first printed copies of the The Best of All Possible Worlds in the spring of 2012. Like all brand new authors I had a list of family members and friends that I wanted to send my book out to. In total I may have sent twenty copies out that first week. More would follow over the next two months.

One of the copies went to Jerry Jarvis, who by 2010 was a friend and someone who had read one of the later, longer chapters in the pre-published book and who had made some good suggestions. Jerry has the great distinction of being one of the earliest TM meditators in the United States and later one of the earliest teachers of TM in the world. He and his wife Debbie learned TM sometime in 1960 from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought the Transcendental Meditation technique to the West from India. By 1961 Jerry was one of Maharishi’s closest assistants and he helped to shape the TM movement in the United States. He worked with Maharishi on an almost continual daily basis for twenty years.

I first saw Jerry Jarvis give a lecture in Cambridge, MA on October 10^th 1974. I had begun TM just several months earlier as a 19-year-old sophomore from Plymouth State College. In April of 1974 I had learned the TM technique at the Cambridge TM Center on Garden Street over my spring break.

Once again I was heading to Cambridge, this time with my philosophy professor, Dr. David Haight and his wife Marjorie. David had encouraged me and four other philosophy majors to learn TM. In the fall semester of 1974 I was in two of David’s philosophy classes. In one of those classes we were reading Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown. The book is written in the form of dialectic, a conversation, if you will, between the writing of Sigmund Freud and other western and eastern thinkers. Brown saw Freud as a visionary who was taking the unconscious and making it conscious. He was also combining eastern and western thought in a style so flawless that if the reader gave over to the process his or her awareness would be changed forever.

Brown’s style of writing was so unique in that Love’s Body contains passages from others’ writings that are juxtaposed in such a way that the words shine light upon one another, supporting the central arguments of each author. Brown drives a synthesis of ideas into a unity. Through his style, articulation, and vision Brown breathes life into the old philosophers’ words that they themselves couldn’t achieve on their own.

So there I am sitting in a hall, at Harvard possibly, I can’t remember, next to David Haight with a newly purchased Norman O. Brown book, bought at the Harvard Coop entitled, Closing Time. How do I know this? My memory is not that precise.

When we moved from our home in New Salem, Mass to our new property in Wellfleet on old Cape Cod, we had to move everything worth bringing and that included over a thousand books give or take. Collectively as a family we gave away four hundred or so to the town libraries of New Salem and Wellfleet. In the collection we kept, I rediscovered my copy of Closing Time, and upon opening it I found my three pages of notes on Jerry’s lecture from October 1974.

From a personal historical standpoint it was an incredible find. I had discovered the moment my life began to take a new direction. It was there in that hall, sitting with a few hundred other meditators listening to Jerry talk for two hours, him seated on the stage in a chair with his legs crossed at the ankles in a business suit — not one worn by a banker, more like one worn by a professor — and he gave a lecture on higher states of consciousness punctuated by Maharishi stories and lots of laughter. Jerry would laugh every few minutes. He was so knowledgeable and so joyous. At one point David leaned over to me and whispered, “Buddha in a business suit.” And that summed it up for me. I wanted to be like Jerry. To be so at ease in front of three hundred people and be so fluent and natural about profound knowledge that one could keep us, the audience, so enthralled with every sentence, and finally to be so happy and blissful doing it. I hadn’t really known up to that point that that was even possible. But when I witnessed it I knew it was what I wanted.

I had been thrilled to be reading Love’s Body in David’s class. I gained new knowledge and insights that stirred in my soul an idealistic vision while grappling with the realization that I could not, as a 19 year-old, fully realize that vision. And then I saw Jerry on stage talking with wonderful ease about Cosmic Consciousness, God Consciousness, and Unity Consciousness. He had a naturalness and charm that I had never seen before. With that a path, an opening, an opportunity to jump, to catapult myself into a new world appeared. I realized that I could move into a world of Vedic knowledge with a teacher, a Great Seer, a Maharishi guiding my every step.

To my parents’ chagrin, I left Plymouth State that December to start the journey of becoming a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. I moved to Amherst, MA in part because my girlfriend at the time lived there and in part because there was a full time TM Center where I could take the Science of Creative Intelligence course two nights a week as the first step in becoming a teacher. I worked six days a week as a nurse’s aid at the Amherst Nursing Home, taking care of eighteen older men. Over the summer I worked making pizza pies on the Jersey shore where my girlfriend worked as a waitress. I applied for Phase 1 of Teacher Training — a three month in-residence course held in the Catskills at an old borscht belt hotel in Livingston Manor.

The course began in September of 1975. Maharishi came through twice and Jerry was with him. Maharishi’s presence was life changing. I completed the course and spent the next five months doing fieldwork in Montclair, NJ, which included giving introductory talks on TM and checking new meditators’ meditations to ensure their practice was effortless. In April I was off to the French Alps for another three-month residence course to complete the training. Finally in July of 1976 Maharishi made me a teacher of TM. It is a moment that is so crystallized in my mind it feels as if I could never forget it in a thousand years.

David Haight, whom I count as one of my dearest friends in the world, Jerry Jarvis, and Maharishi, to whom I am forever and gratefully linked, all loom large in my mind still.

Forty years later I’m still teaching TM. I sit like Jerry in a chair in the front of our small den with my wife Kay, who is also a TM teacher, and tell Maharishi stories and talk about transcending and higher states of consciousness. I’m still an insistent reader…. I will have two or three books going at a time. Occasionally I still pick up Norman. As a nineteen year-old I could for the most part create only an intellectual framework in trying to understand him. Now at 62 I think I have his vision. I understand what he was doing and where he was going.

Norman finishes Love’s Body by leading us to a passage from Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism with these words:

“The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, and silence overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.”

‘Hereby the duality, the discrepancy between mind and body, mundane form and supramundane formlessness, is annihilated. Then the body of the Enlightened One becomes luminous in appearance, convincing and inspiring by its mere presence, while every word and every gesture, and even his (her) silence communicate the overwhelming reality the Dharma. It is not the audible word through which people are converted and transformed in their inner most being, but through that which goes beyond words and flows directly from the presence of the saint: the inaudible mantric sound that emanates from his heart. Therefore the perfect saint is called “Muni”, the “Silent One.’

Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, p. 226

There is a great ocean of silent Being within all of us. Effortless transcending is the key to discovering this part of ourselves. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as the custodian of this knowledge, taught the technique of Transcendental Meditation so that everyone could have this experience and grow in expanded consciousness, health, and success. This is the path I’ve taken and I’ve never looked back.

 

When I began writing my first novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, I didn’t know what to expect.

I had encouragement from my wife, sons, and a few close friends. One of those friends said over dinner one evening, “Steve, I think that you’ll write like you talk. If you write in the style in which you tell your stories I think it will be very interesting.” Funny, that unexpected comment coming from a bright, intellectual woman was the tipping point.

I had so enjoyed writing in high school and college that I had aspirations to become a writer. But the realization of that desire had to wait for another day as the stream of life rushed by and carried me along with it; marriage, children, family obligations, the necessity of a steady income—all that brought my mind into focus as to what was needed. Of course, I had happily fallen in love with my dear Kay. I was overjoyed and delighted to have two sons born—Michael first, and Jonathan second. I was more than eager to enter into business to prove I could support my wife and family. I was dedicated to being a husband, a father, and the bringer-home of the bacon.

Over a period of twenty-five years, from 1981 to 2006, we had started and ran three businesses. Sixty hour weeks were more common than not, especially in the beginning of each business. Not just the first few months, but also the first three to four years. There were enough obstacles to each endeavor that none should have succeeded. Some obstacles I unknowingly created, some were just karmic. But I was determined to make whatever success I could in a honest and ethical way, and I did succeed in that I had three creative businesses that reflected our values and supported us in a welcoming middle class way.

From a writer’s standpoint, my business years gave me opportunities to travel, meet thousands of people, and live a rich and varied day-to-day life. As a result I have lots of material to draw from as I let my imagination animate my stories and experiences. In the end, all those years were a blessing because it set the stage for the second half of my life.

Then in January of 2006 I woke up one morning and felt the weight lift. I lay in bed realizing the karma of those past two and a half decades was resolved. I had worked through it and it was time to sell our third business, our modest wholesale bakery, which we then did later that year. With that sale and a timely gift from my wife’s parents I could look up from my bakers table, take off my apron, and seek new horizons.

So I got back to creative writing after a 25-year hiatus. Here’s the experience that I had when I began writing my novel…I had the beginning, something of the middle, and the end of the story, sort of, but I didn’t have the whole story. That only came as I started to write and continued writing. I also noticed that when I started writing a part of my brain woke up, or turned on, and my consciousness shifted into what I called writing mode. Once that switched on, everything flowed and my writing was effortless. That doesn’t mean it was all good, just uninhibited. So my writing style wasn’t ‘let’s write 3-4 pages today and stop and repeat again tomorrow’. No, I wrote whole chapters in one sitting, could be 18 pages or 30 pages, but the whole chapter emerged.

In between chapters, which could be a week or two, I found I just thought very quietly about the story. I asked myself what would happen next and then let my awareness work on that. At some point I would get a ‘signal’, and I knew I was ready to sit and write again. And write I did, nonstop for 2-3 hours at a time before I would reach the end of the chapter, and then I would stop.

The process was thrilling. I was highly focused but not in a forced way, more in a witnessing way. Sometimes I felt like I was taking dictation. Sometimes the characters would get in a conversation and I just transcribed their words. Many times I was surprised at what was being said and what I was writing. I laughed out loud. I actually cried a couple of times as I typed. I think that the spontaneous welling up of deep emotions translated into my writing so that the readers could feel it too.

All of this being said, the first draft took me about 16 months to complete. It was well over 400 pages, approaching 500. It was as wonderful as it was raw and it needed much work. I read it all the way through. What I saw was that I became a better writer as I progressed through those 16 months. Not really surprising, but worth noting. I did some rewriting and revision.

But I knew I needed help to get this in shape. I needed an editor and found one with whom I worked for a year. Oh what a year that was! If I was elated during my writing process, I was summarily brought to a place of frustration, distress, and sometimes anger in working with my editor. Honestly, she did save the book despite the fact it was a torturous path for me. Writing and working with an editor is not for the faint of heart, or one deeply insecure about their self worth. But I survived it and learned a great deal. And I finally had a manuscript I could work with.

In the end I did three partial rewrites (the last one was big) and gave it to a copy editor. Some more revising and learning about the Oxford comma ensued (I had learned in a college writing class that ‘and’ took the place of the last comma when naming a list of things, but the editor insisted I still needed that last comma). In this way, writing can be tedious and involve hard work. Not hard work like being in the restaurant business or running an artisan wholesale bakery, but mind-numbing hard work just the same.

I read somewhere that writing a book is an act of pure creativity and publishing a book is an act of pure ego. Although that seems a little harsh, I can tell you after spending five and a half years on writing and rewriting The Best of All Possible Worlds one certainly desires readers. With that, the author enters into a whole different world of expectation, happiness, and disappointment. If you’re lucky and can manage expectations you end up on the positive side. Fortunately, I landed on that side, and thus I’m working on my next novel. It does come down to doing the work. Any excuses not to continue working your craft or form of creative expression needs to be firmly dealt with and then brushed aside. Just keep going. Keep getting better at what you do and enjoy the process.

This is my way of saying that if you aspire to be a writer, an artist, a dancer, a musician, a singer, a poet, a storyteller, a photographer, and this is truly what you want, then don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Do the work, manage your expectations, and enjoy the creative process. The process is the important piece, because the process changes your brain and your awareness. It opens you up. It gives life-affirming energy. It makes you feel young and alive. That’s the reward. The rest is just a bonus.

Here are a few reasons you might want to read this…

I always wanted to be a writer, but didn’t really start writing until I was 53.

It took me 25 years to clear my desk and begin anew.

I believe in true love and have been blessed by it.

I love all the Beatles, but George is the one with whom I’m most simpatico.

I’m a surfer, sailor, and lover of all things oceanic.

I believe that every human being has the potential to be come enlightened, starting now.

Life is a joy, should always be a joy, except when it’s not.

So let’s not forget who we are and where we are going.

We’ll do the journey together.  It’s going to be fun.  I promise.