It is true, it may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life…The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals…We must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and then we must judge them.
-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Chapter 11
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“I stared at the sun and saw his face looking down on me. And these words came to me”, he said with lucid rapture: “the sun is my father, and my father won’t hurt me”. A glaze of liquid had covered the surface of his eyes as he nostalgically stared out through the thick glass window. The sun’s glare brightened the blue of his eyes; his black pupils looked as if they had suddenly disappeared. Sitting back in his motorized wheelchair, the “permobile”, he continued tangentially: “This life, at least here in the West, is inherently full of self-doubt”. He paused momentarily and looked over at me. “It is not wrong, but we lose touch with our divinity, our true nature. Sadly, we are shamed out of recognizing our own inner wisdom. We are constantly searching for validation from others about what we already know. The only true authority lies in ourselves.”
I looked at him with a sigh of resignation. “Not again” I wanted to say.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
He took a moment before speaking. “I doubted myself my entire life” he explained. “Doubt has been my worst enemy.”
“I don’t care so much anymore. Either I can choose to die in a meaningless universe or one where love is the source of everything.”
He shrugged his shoulders and turned his decaying, crusty old hands towards me.
“I have to piss” he said abruptly.
David placed his feet firmly on the floor in front of the wheelchair. He shifted his weight forward and pressed downwards. He lifted his hips an inch off of the seat while shifting his torso over his toes before collapsing back down onto the chair. “It is an art” he said with a playful sadness.
“I don’t know what they have in store for me” he said, shaking his head and pointing to the sky.
David sat for a moment to catch his breath. “I shit and I piss. That is my life” he said laughing. “Trivial matters of great importance”.
He reached his hand towards mine and I helped him find enough balance to raise himself. I grabbed the portable urinal and held it below his waist where he begun to pee.
“Who would have thought” I said to him. We both laughed.
David has been living in a nursing home for the past nine months. He was diagnosed with Multiple Systems Atrophy, a neurological disease, which is slowly and progressively deteriorating his central nervous system. It is terminal and currently incurable. He cannot walk, can barely use the bathroom, and his memory is slowly beginning to fade. He has been living in the highly supervised, intensive care unit of the nursing home for the past two months. The “ward”, about 250 feet long, houses about thirty “inmates” (as David calls them), with late stage dementia or other terminal, aging illnesses.
Before even reaching David, I walk down a urine scented, windowless hallway where a dozen residents sit paralyzed, often moaning, in their wheelchairs staring aimlessly into television sets. Scores of men and women rush by me with face masks and long blue scrubs. A young Chinese exchange student plays guitar to another group of paralyzed residents in the hallway.
“Anyway, let me continue” David remarked after returning to his chair. “I was alone on 6th Avenue, in Manhattan, and the sun was just beginning to rise out from the darkness. And as I looked to the sun, I realized that the sun was truth and I was not.”
He paused reflectively. “I was fine, a good kid. But I realized that I had been faking it, coercing the life around me.” David moved his torso from side to side, impersonating a running back trying to avoid a tackle.
“And so I ran from the rising sun. I hid in the shadows on the sides of the buildings, but the sun would quickly take up the space. I continued to run. I ran sixty blocks to Central Park, staring down on the lake where Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the White rabbit were stationed. At this point, I realized that I could not run anymore. And so I turned around and stared into the sunlight.”
David took a breath, adjusted his seat, and continued. “I had just finished my first week of graduate school. We had taken an exam about the anatomy of perception a few days earlier. I knew that I couldn’t stare at the sun. I knew that the shaky disc on the sun’s surface was actually the chaotic disruption of my rods and cones. But when I looked up at the sky, I saw his face. I saw his face for the first time since I was a young boy on that baseball field. I felt reassured, validated. I knew that it was real.”
I shook my head in the now familiar resigned astonishment.
“And I continued to stare into the sun but I knew that I would be okay.”
David slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a picture of an old Indian man with clenched eyes, a thick large nose, and an awkward half smile. “This is him” he said. “Maharaji”.
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked.
“I had the opportunity once. But my wife had just given birth to my daughter. I made the choice to stay home and just months later he passed away.” David looked down at the picture reminicintly.
“Years ago” David continued with both acceptance and longing, “when I was traveling through India, I was on my way to Bodh Gaya to sit at the Bodhi Tree, the tree where the Buddha had attained enlightenment. It was a monumental moment. And as I was sitting on the train, twelve hours away, there was an announcement that a monsoon had broken parts of the rail line.” David’s body was still in the wheelchair. “I never made it.”
“You were so close” I said.
David nodded. “But he is always with me, watching over me. Teaching me.” He looked reassured. “One afternoon, years later, sitting in meditation, he came to me standing in the corner of my room. I asked him why he never let me be with him.”
He paused.
“He told me that I would have been too attached to his form. And he was right. But I cried and cried and cried because I finally knew that he did not abandon me.”
“But you must remember, this all happened years after the day in Manhattan. At that point, I did not even know who he was.”
David took a moment to recollect his thoughts. “But when I saw him in the sun on that day, it radically reorganized my perception of the world. And I realized that I was never going to taught what I needed to learn in graduate school” he said laughing.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
David glanced to the left, furrowed his eyebrows, and sighed. “They all stood by the fire, looking only at the things they could see. They stayed safe; no one dared to venture into the darkness. No one could understand what I had just experienced.”
“So why did you finish?” I asked.
“To survive” he said simply. He paused. “But also, at that point in my life, I still felt as if if I needed a mashgiach”. He laughed while I looked bemused.
“The Rabbi who gives the stamp of approval for a food to be considered kosher” he explained, noticing my confusion. He raised his eyebrows and curled his lips inwards, connecting his thumb and index finger together. “Very official” he said with his subtle, playful wisdom.
“Because only then could my knowledge be considered valid or valuable; maybe even taken seriously. But not only by others but by myself.” Chuckling, he added, “When that didn’t happen, I thought the PhD would do it. I’m not so sure anymore.”
“You see, when I was young, people would ask, What books have you read? But now, they ask, What books have you written? We are all chasing mashgiachs”, he concluded, laughing again and looking down at the picture of Maharaji.
I walked around his wheelchair thinking. “So what should we do with our lives then?”
David sat upright and his blue eyes pierced firmly into me. “There are no mistakes” he said with a pointed softness. “No mistakes”.
“We have been chosen to inhabit the life we have been given. God has made us so that ‘he’ can experience the infinite varieties of sentient existence. There are no mistakes. Whatever you do is right.”
“But it is very difficult” he went on. “We forget, so in this earthly plane, much seems to be at stake. It is no wonder we take things so seriously: We die. One mistake and it is over. The car we choose to drive, the clothes that we wear, the jobs we take, or the words that we choose to speak. We have to be certain, to be right, to know things.”
“But beyond this plane, there are no mistakes. There is no good or bad. No safe or not safe. Those things do not exist.” He paused again. “We can catch glimpses.”
“We are all angels in disguise” he concluded smiling.
“But how do you know?” I asked again impatiently.
“Either profound wisdom or the ramblings of an old acid head” he laughed and shifted his gaze back out the bedroom window.
I looked at him silently, both full of wonder and skepticism. “It’s really all bullshit” I concluded quickly to myself. “Unfalsifiable, un-empirical, anti-intellectual BS that gives comfort to our meaningless individual human existences.”
We suddenly were interrupted by an intense, quick moving nurse in her early thirties who was holding a tray with David’s lunch. She placed the tray down on his portable, brown desk, and quickly pulled the plastic covers off of the three small containers he requests for every meal: prune juice, chocolate ice cream, and salsa.
I tried to ignore her. I didn’t feel like talking.
“Thank you my love” he beamed with a radiant smile staring deeply into her eyes.
I shook my head with acquiescence. He does this with everyone.
“Oh, this is Zach” he said, holding his hand out towards me.
“Yes, I met him before, don’t you remember?” David shook his head uncertainly.
“The day when you were saying that I was the slut!” She bantered.
“The contradictions in human beings” I chuckled, thinking to myself. “From God to this. How human.”
Slightly red in the face, he held his hand over his mouth, playfully ashamed. After a deep breath and moment of silent space, David looked up at the nurse and said with his unabashed authenticity, “You are the best. I love you.”
“You say that to whoever is in your face!” she quickly retorted.
We all laughed.
I was especially grateful that she, unlike me, was willing to point out his ridiculousness. It was all so ridiculous.
I looked at my watch and noticed that I was running late for work.
“David, I’m sorry, I really need to leave. I didn’t notice the time.”
He looked at me and feigned the cry of an infant. The nurse laughed.
I hate it when he does that.
And I thought back on all the times that he would make that sound. And then I thought of all the times he would refuse my help. His endless internal conflict. The nurse did not understand the depth of that cry or the complexity of this man.
For the story I hear underneath is the fear that we will always be left alone and we will always end up disappointed: Only depend on oneself.
And yet, I think that he has spent his entire life chasing a man whose promises an eternal presence; a mother who never leaves.
But day after day, as David’s body continues to deteriorate, in a profound irony, he becomes more and more hopelessly and uncontrollably dependent on everyone around him.
The man in the sun does not seem to care but the people around him have continued to be there. And are always there.
And he does know this.
But he is also right. In the end, they will not be enough. He will have to go alone.
“It’s okay” he spoke gently. “Thank you” he said. “Take some money”
“But we just talked today. We didn’t do any work”
“Take some. You came all this way to see me”
“But we didn’t do anything” I said again.
“Please” he said.
I took a 20 dollar bill with guilt and walked back onto the unit. The smell of old urine wafted into my nostrils as I saw the row of old men and women lined paralyzed, moaning, in their wheelchairs staring aimlessly into television sets. Scores of men and women rushed by me with face masks and long blue scrubs. The young Chinese exchange student was still playing guitar to the other group of paralyzed residents in the hallway.
“It is so complicated” I thought to myself.
From whatever source, neurotic, delusional, transcendent, or none, he has found a way to deal with the harshness of this world. And he has found a peace and solace that so few can find. He is so loved, so kind, and so open. He finds meaning in nothingness, in suffering, and in death.
And although he is sometimes scared, he knows that he will be taken care of. He knows that there are no mistakes. He knows that it is all okay.
Can most of us say this as well?
But all this comes at the cost, most likely, of seeing reality clearly. And I am left to ponder whether these stories only add richness to his life or do they prevent him from experiencing, knowing, learning something far more powerful? And to ponder whether he has come to terms with his life or has he merely found a way to escape from it’s brutal reality? And to ponder whether he is experiencing something truly extraordinary that most of us merely do not yet know?
I don’t know.
And as I walk down the urine scented unit, I pass a woman, with sagging cheeks and rotting teeth staring blankly into the space around her, interminably yelling to no one, “help! help! help!”
David’s words begun to echo in the back of my mind
“It is an act of faith. Either I can choose to die in a meaningless universe or one where love is the source of everything.”
Maybe he is right.
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It is true, it may be painful, or may show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant, because the best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. They have always been esteemed so; here if anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life…The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals…We must, therefore, first describe the fruits of the religious life, and then we must judge them.
-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Chapter 11
Zach Rausch 