rigorousintuition.ca

Chapter 4: The Wild Tibetan

Nancy

I met John in Boulder, Colorado, during the summer of 1975. I had been living a chop-wood-carry-water existence for the past seven years with my husband, Paul Harper, in the wilderness of British Columbia. We had left San Francisco and moved to the back of beyond to insure that our acid trips would be totally undisturbed. We lived on a commune while raising our two children, Megan, age six, and Michael, age three, and a seven-year-old indigenous foster child who had fetal alcohol syndrome.

As a native San Franciscan, I had shunned the Haight-Ashbury ritual of dropping acid around hordes of people. Paul and I longed for nights of endless LSD communion with the Tao, the Source, and the assurance that there would be no intruders to bring us down. So we lived two miles from either neighbor, which meant long treks during the winter when the logging roads weren’t plowed. Snowed in for weeks at a time, we had all the comforts that didn’t require electricity or running water. Stacks of firewood and spiritual books. Horses, goats, kerosene lanterns, and a propane stove. A battery-operated phonograph to play Traffic, the Doors, Dylan. A community of friends who lacked boundaries and sensibilities, but shared equally fried senses of reality along with the responsibilities of children, gardens, and animals. Unlike the media’s caricature of the freewheeling hippie, we were on a rigorous spiritual quest that called for the destruction of our egos by severing all attachments. That meant letting friends borrow chain saws, vehicles, husbands, and wives. Often they would return broken,d effective, unwilling to work again. Sometimes you had to go looking for them. Have you seen my drill bit? Did my wife sleep here last night?

I was the daughter of two award-winning San Francisco journalists. A musical prodigy from the age of six, when an IQ test explained the boredom I was experiencing, I skipped the second grade. At the age of thirteen, after refusing the opportunity to become a concert pianist (I had discovered boys), I made weekend pilgrimages to North Beach with my friends. We hung out at City Lights Bookstore, rapping with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and hoping to catch a glimpse of Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac. Having received the finest public education possible at Lowell High, which is still among the top ten in the country, I was steeped in literature and the arts. I was going to be a writer.

In high school, nuns in the street would cross themselves when they caught sight of our black leotards and leather sandals. Flabbergasted, the jocks and social queens didn’t know what to do with us. All they could come up with were unimaginative whispers of “whores.” They were so unhip, we’d just roll our eyes. The school administrators sarcastically called us “The Lowell Intelligentsia” in the same way the Cultural Elite is sneered at today. Despite the bravado over Lowell’s reputation, our academic rebellion threatened the administration. We rejected pep rallies and football games; we wanted to study poetry, art, and music. The girls’ dean declared it illegal to wear the handmade sandals we bought in North Beach, feigning concern lest we get our toes stuck in a door. So we’d don tennis shoes to walk the halls, and wear the sandals in class. If we dressed too outrageously in handmade tunics, they sent us home, claiming we looked pregnant. Confident we were part of an epic in the making, we survived humiliation by sticking together.

Only one teacher, Maurice Englander, really understood us. He quietly approved of our plumage and offered his classroom as a safe haven during sports rallies and lunch periods to study poetry and classical music, thereby escaping the ubiquitous ridicule that echoed through the halls. Later, when the rednecks came to town wearing dashikis and love beads, looking to get laid, we resented the price we’d paid in bloody tears for those fashion statements.

At San Francisco State during my freshman year, we met other baby beatniks and gave birth to the hippies. My kids teased me about that. “How can you invent the hippies?”

“Someone had to and besides, I read it I Rolling Stone. Ben Fong-Torres said the first hippies used to gather at a table in the Commons at State.” Kids think if it’s in Rolling Stone, it’s etched in stone. We were a bunch of rebellious, angst-filled teenagers, absorbing Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and On the Road, along with the incredible magic that backlit San Francisco in the early sixties. Distilling the creative fervor of the Beat Generation with our Boomer adolescent laziness, we created a societal sea change. I was there for that, for the drugs and the psychedelic music, the Charlatans, Janis Joplin, and the Jefferson Airplane. In 1964 I transferred to Berkeley just in time for the Free Speech Movement, majoring in philosophy.

I met Paul Harper at the San Francisco Juvenile Hall, where we worked with hard-core delinquents. Disgusted with the Haight-Ashbury pond scum that surfaced after the Hell’s Angels grisly debacle at Altamont, we were wary of the counterculture’s assimilation. Visions of love and light were disintegrating into drug overdoses and runaway tragedies. We fled the city and spent a year living in an abandoned cabin on a mining claim two miles up a dirt road from Callahan, a tiny lumber town near Mt. Shasta in Northern California, where Paul spent his childhood. That taste of country living sparked a yearning for unspoiled wilderness. The following spring, in a 1942 Ford truck loaded to the hilt, we immigrated to British Columbia. “You look like something out of The Grapes of Wrath,” my mother said prophetically.

For the next year years, we built our own houses and tended horses, goats, chickens, and gardens. When a social worker for the Canadian government came knocking on our door because she’s heard we had worked with problem children, we didn’t have the heart to refuse her request to take in an indigenous foster child. Andy Johnson was a crippled, brain-damaged four-year-old who was barely toilet trained. He had a sweet temperament and a certain magical detachment from the phenomenal world that made him irresistible.

Embracing voluntary poverty, without electricity or running water, we started a commune and wrote our own rules. Rumors about us practicing black magic began to circulate in the Kootenay Valley where we’d settled, spread by jealous husbands and wives who’d lost their spouses to the mystique of our merry band. It was a period of great pain and growth, laced with wild spiritual insights and abject ignorance. We prided ourselves on being so far removed from the agonies of the real world that we didn’t pay any attention to the Vietnam War, Watergate, or the moon landing, which we were convinced was a hoax.

Eventually, my smug complacency started to erode. I realized our rigid sanctions against mediocrity had us on the same treadmill as the bourgeois life we shunned. We were as attached to our trips, our tools and plumage, as a herd of male peacocks, or a gaggle of Junior Leaguers. My mother send me Meditation in Action, written by a young Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who had come to the States to teach Buddhism during the early seventies. The book resonated deeply in my soul. Increasingly miserable in my abusive marriage to Paul, I decided to spend a summer studying meditation with Rinpoche I Boulder, Colorado.

One of the greatest benefits of communal living was that parents could leave their children in the care of extended family. Our foster child had recently been removed from our home by the Canadian government when they passed a law that indigenous foster children had to live with indigenous families. While I was sorry to say good-bye to Andy, who had spent four years with us, I was tired of merely surviving on the land and desperately craved a new life. After seven years of austerity, although I was still passionately attached to the natural beauty of our four hundred acres, my city-girl nature was starved for more intellectual stimulation than radio and the daily mail run.

Inspired since my beatnik days by the mystical yearnings of Rimbaud, Lao Tsu, and Meister Eckhart, I intensified my spiritual crusade to find eternal truth and wisdom. As if answering a call, every child of that lineage, all the hip quester heroes traveled to Boulder that magical summer of 1975. They came to study with the young Tibetan Rinpoche at his newly founded Buddhist university, the Naropa Institute. Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso were there, as well as William Burroughs, Michael McClure, Kate Millet, and Baba Ram Das. It felt like the most happening thing since the birth of the hippies, a spiritual Woodstock. We hadn’t felt such palpable magic since the early sixties. We were relieved to find we hadn’t lost it.

A magnetic aura surrounded Rinpoche (a Tibetan honorific meaning “precious one” and pronounced RIM-po-chay). Infamously wild, in his mid-thirties, and wearing Saville Row suits, he smoked Raleighs, drank whiskey, ate red meat, and sampled the entire panoply of hippie pharmaceuticals. He’d had a son by a Tibetan nun and had run off with his blonde British wife when she was sixteen. As a holder of the exotic Crazy Wisdom lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, his outrageous behavior was traditionally viewed as teaching. His renegade flamboyance appealed to the artists, poets, and musicians who flocked around him.

Finally, we felt, here was someone who wasn’t trying to temper our passions, while proclaiming the possibility of enlightenment in one lifetime. Every other Eastern guru had admonished us to curb our intensity and deny our appetites in order to achieve detachment. I understood how attachment causes pain. If you encounter a dead dog on the road, you might feel a pang, but nothing like if it’s actually your dog. Nevertheless, I could never get behind the command simply to cut desire. Rinpoche’s method was to go into the depth of passion to wear out the samsaric impulses. Samsara is Sanskrit for the endless wheel of death and rebirth, the treadmill to which we slavishly return in our ignorance. It is the opposite of enlightenment. We liked his message. It gave us some more time to dally in the eternal youth zone that hallmarked our generation.

We had no inkling that his method would be so mutually painful. Disillusioned by the unhappy stasis of our parent’s lives, we were inspired to chart our course far from their moral guidelines. Years later, when Rinpoche’s behavior turned criminally insane and too abusive to raise our children under the umbrella of his trappings, some of us would come full circle and embrace the sanity of our roots with tremendous relief. By then, we were educated about the marks of a cult leader. By then, the traditional values of our childhood looked like an oasis of lucid simplicity. When I consider the extraordinary journey of this gifted man, who ended his life as a tragic alcoholic, I ultimately freeze in a morass of ambivalence. Men like Rinpoche and Johnny take you on their roller coaster, soaring from passion’s heights to the depths of degradation. It’s all a matter of being a spiritual gun moll, game enough to go along for the ride.

It was precisely this license to befriend our emotions that drew John to Rinpoche in 1971. He was living in Greenwich Village with the mother of his two-year-old daughter, Blake, whom he refused to marry. After a particularly ugly fight, he attended a talk by Rinpoche. Johnny lingered in the room long after the crowd left. Rinpoche4 was speaking with a few other students and finally turned to John, who blurted out, “Sir, I have a lot of aggression and anger that I cannot subdue.” Expecting the usual rap about conquering passions with meditation and developing a peaceful state of mind, Rinpoche’s reply startled him.

“You have a lot of anger? That is fantastic! Don’t try to get rid of it. Express it, make friends with it. That is the only way to tame your emotions.” John had been playing with Transcendental Meditation, a technique that attempts to suppress negativity. The problem with that is, where does it go? His friends were flocking to Spain with the Beatles and actress Mia Farrow. They had been admonishing John to control his drunken outbursts with TM and were less than charmed by Rinpoche’s tolerance of John’s anger. After all, he was supposed to be settling down now that he was a father.

Unfortunately, he flared with defensive rage at the suggestion that his emotions needed to be curbed. It takes maturity to harness the volcano that erupts from the soul of a true artist. Thanks to the alcoholic adults in his life, John’s emotional growth had been arrested during his childhood. For temperaments like ours, Rinpoche’s technique worked better than TM’s amputation of desires. He urged us to explore our dark sides. By illuminating the shadows, confusion would dawn as wisdom. He warned us it was not a path for the fainthearted. To a standup guy like John, this was a challenge he could not resist.

Rinpoche’s patience touched him deeply. That meeting was the breaking point of Johnny’s old relationships. A wedge was driven between those who favored the Maharishi’s blessed-out state and the Tibetaqn’s barbaric technique of exhausting negativity. “Don’t try to escape your emotions,” he taught. “Wear them out like an old shoe.” Later, when he wasn’t allowed contact with Blake due to his drinking, John would claim “Indians stole my daughter.”

We learned basic Buddhism that summer, starting with the Four Noble Truths. “The essential fabric of life is suffering,” Rinpoche claimed in a lecture that summer. “There is an element of pain in everything. You cannot even begin to experience the notion of freedom until you acknowledge this background of suffering. It comes from nowhere, yet it’s everywhere, because we want so much to like everything and be happy. We think that is our birthright. Suffering only ceases when we reach the realization that pain and pleasure are one. This one taste, with no duality, comes from the discipline of sitting meditation. Enlightenment lies beyond good and bad, past bewilderment and sorrow. It’s different from happiness. The important thing is to connect with the pain, instead of increasing speed and aggression to get away from it, as you do in Western society. Only then can one attain equanimity.”

We learned about the Buddha’s teachings on the Three Marks of Existence. If suffering is the first Mark, it is followed by the constant presence of impermanence, the second Mark. It takes a fundamental act of bravery to admit this but we really do conduct our lives on very shaky ground. Nothing is intrinsically solid. Chaos and strife, little hypocrisies, never disappear. The problem lies in learning to live with ourselves. Uncertainties and fickleness plague us relentlessly. All that is left is the continuity of discontinuity. And within that lies the egoless state, the third Mark, able to function without solidification or credentials.

Rinpoche proclaimed that learning at Naropa would be based upon a student’s experience and state of mind rather than memorization and regurgitation. As veterans of top universities and a variety of acid trips, this was welcomed. Traditional schooling frustrated us, and now Rinpoche, who was supposedly enlightened, confirmed our attitudes as no one else had.

Despite the superstars, Ripoche insisted there was nothing special about Naropa. Through the process of slowing down, practicing our sitting meditation, and feeling the haunting quality of impermanence, we would develop a new way of looking at things. Newer than acid, with none of the psychedelic fallout? We were ready for that! Many of us were parents with young children and although we were still into peak experiences, we were looking for a little less excitement. All-night acid trips lose their appeal when crying babies wake you early in the morning.

Rinpoche held up a fresh mirror, a way to get to know ourselves. His meditation technique, taught by the Buddha, was simply to sit quietly, follow the breath and notice how thoughts arise and fade. He gave us a magnifying glass to look at all the hidden crannies we rushed to ignore. We were encouraged to slow down and make friends with the process of our thoughts. There was no promise of a magical mystery tour. He scoffed at the aggressive search for religious highs. During his nightly lectures, he would challenge us in an impeccable Oxford accent: “When your mind stops revving, you might feel like a grain of sand in the Gobi desert, majestic and simple. At that point, you can cultivate a sense of precision. Your mind will click into how to deal with the situation at hand with little confusion.” For the refugees from Leave-It-to-Beaver-land, we fervently aspired to meet his challenge. Having watched our parents suffocate in their attempts to avoid suffering, we craved the heroic state of victory over ego-driven futility. Rinpoche’s brand of enlightenment had a gutsy quality that blended well with our increasingly grim view of the world. In that post-Kennedy assassination era, we were realizing our generation wasn’t going to change much of anything. The notion of individual salvation was extremely inviting.

When Rinpoche told us to view the entire phenomenal world as our friend, he appealed to our vestigial love-generation taproot. By transplanting this radically new outlook into our hearts, we could generate compassion, wakefulness, and the ability to be gentle. Bodhicitta, the essence of the Buddha, was the fruition of an awakened heart, arising from the confusion of pain and aggression. Enter Bodhisattva, that enigmatic term we’d learned from Kerouac, who wrote of mystical saints dwelling in an eternal present, with a Christlike compassion for all beings. We were offered Bodhisattva vows, a commitment to an endless cycle of rebirths, until the last sentient being in the universe is enlightened. As Rinpoche described the qualities of a Bodhisattva, the openness and clarity, the spontaneity and tenderness, we felt like we’d come home.

And then Rinpoche delivered the final coup. History had confined our literary heroes to the Mahayana, or Middle Way of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhism. Rinpoche was the most brilliant pioneer of that passage. He transmitted the highest teachings of Tantric Vajrayana Buddhism in a language we could understand. Previously held secret behind the fortress of snow mountains surrounding Tibet, these teachings were considered dangerous if not transmitted by a Tantric Master, a guru who works directly with the student. Vajrayana practice requires the personal experience of initiation and empowerment directly from a teacher who provides an oral transmission of the teachings, the dharma, along with secret mantras and ritual practice.

Rinpoche carefully studied his Western students, their particular hang-ups, their attractions and addictions. Unfortunately, that study eventually caught him in his own wringer. Twelve years later, he would die of one of the worst cases of acute alcoholism and drug addiction I had ever seen. And I knew, because by that time I was working in a silk-sheet rehab center in La Jolla, California, and John was lying in some gutter in the Los Angeles Asian ghetto, having succumbed to his inability and unwillingness to curb his instincts. As they say in AA, it took what it took. Rinpoche’s drinking himself to death served to wake John up to his own hell-bent; shortly after that he got sober for good. So who’s to say who was wrong and what really worked? Rinpoche emanated from a lineage called the Crazy Wisdom gurus, commonly misunderstood by the Western mind. In this tradition, the teacher imparts his lessons through outrageous actions. Later, when John and I lived in Kathmandu, Tibetans would tell us in hushed tones how fortunate we were to have Rinpoche as a teacher. “Oh, he very enlightened being. He drink a lot, right? You no worry about that. All Trungpas drank.”

Rinpoche was the eleventh incarnation in the succession of Trungpas. However, the others had lived within the confines of Tibetan monasticism. In America, Rinpoche was on his own, in a jungle of Western temptations that the others had never encountered. Years later, in 1989, our friend the Dalai Lama told us privately that he would never trust a guru who claimed, as Rinpoche had, that he could turn alcohol into an elixir. “Changing religions is very difficult,” he said. “I do not advocate converting from Judeo-Christian traditions to Tibetan Buddhism. It is very difficult to understand a religion that is not of one’s cultural heritage. One must examine the teacher with the utmost scrutiny. There are many charlatans.”

In the early days, Rinpoche mirrored our wild ways. As we matured, he lost his hold over us. Eventually John and I voiced strong moral objections about the irresponsibility of Rinpoche’s teachings. The story of that harrowing journey contains grave admonitions about the methods and madness of certain Tibetan lamas. Now that Tibetan Buddhism has become chic, the hottest new religion, I have concerns about how these gurus come without operating instructions. Far removed from papal constraints, their freewheeling style usually results in severe abuses of power and sexuality.

I still don’t have a clear answer to the paradox of Rinpoche’s life and death. Sometimes I think he was just a garden-variety addict who died of his disease. Did he purposely drink himself to death so that we would quit depending on him? Did we kill him with our greed and manipulation as we clamored to be near him? The Tibetan party line is that the guru takes on the diseases of his students, and most of us were full-fledged addicts when we met him. There was a depth to the experienced I had with Rinpoche, similar to the chaos I went through with John, which taught me that sometimes the only answer is a silent dwelling in the grey area beyond right and wrong. Nothing is either black or white. It just is. And that does not excuse anything.

In the end, the final proclamation of a guru’s worth can be found in his students. Those who remain loyal to Rinpoche’s vision display the pathetic lack of identity found in every cult. They are unhappy pod people who toast his posthumous brilliance with pretentious, self-aggrandizing platitudes. Denying his abuse of power and his rampant addictions (a $40,000-a-year cocaine habit, along with a penchant for Seconal and gallons of sake), they exhibit symptoms of untreated codependents. In order to restore our sanity, John and I had to distance ourselves physically and emotionally. In that heartbreaking process, we were forced to acknowledge those qualities in us that were attracted to the cult of Rinpoche’s personality in the first place. Yet Rinpoche’s definition of a spiritual warrior is one who knows himself. And so, the fruition of our path was also the point.

http://www.american-buddha.com/cult.othersideeden.htm

26. Close Encounters

NANCY


People still ask me how I managed to stay in the relationship. In those early years, despite John's mood swings and heavy drinking, we clung to the sweetness we saw in each other. Our survival-mode living skills dovetailed beautifully. We had both grown up in a war zone, so we were addicted to a constant crisis and drama. As children, when insanity screamed from the rafters, no one was allowed to speak about it. We learned not to trust or even feel emotions. However, as is typical in recovery, those childhood safeguards eventually stopped working. The strength of our emotions was so powerful that we were forced to deal with feelings directly, instead of using the habitual defense of stuffing them.

As our relationship deepened, we dredged up the unimaginable and unmentionable from each other's psyches. Our psychic Roto-Rooting turned our safe haven into the trench warfare of our childhoods. In his search for recognition at any price, John had become a master manipulator. Abandoned by our parents as they chased after their own narcissistic reflections, we both had self-esteem issues, which resulted in the deleterious practice of people pleasing. Since neither of us knew how to communicate discomfort without anger, our fights became more frequent. And then, strangely, in the midst of our mutual napalm, we could drop the rage enough to give comfort, to search for meaning and hope. We never gave up on each other.

Later, when I became personally familiar with the private lives of my existential heroes, Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, I learned those guys had grappled with the same painful issues. For many years I have corresponded with beat icon Neal Cassady's widow, Carolyn, who was also Kerouac's longtime lover. She is one of the few women I've known who can truly understand my journey with John. Once Carolyn told me:

"People, especially feminists, ask me constantly why I didn't dump Neal. The circumstances he provided me were tailor-made, exactly what I needed to jolt me out of attitudes blocking my growth. Suffering is necessary in order to change. I pity those who aren't strong enough or too blind to have known such men as Neal, John, and Jack."

Psychiatrist R. D. Laing's widow, Marguerite, has also given me enormous solace about that chaotic period. Ronnie was a consummate alcoholic, yet Marguerite stayed with him because every other man paled in comparison, drunk or sober. She knows the magnetism of a man who reveals the full sweep of human emotions, from drooling drunkard to a brilliant, creative cult hero. We've spent hours talking about what it's like to live out the myth of Beauty and the Beast, as Ronald Colman morphs into Quasimodo.

William Burroughs watched his son die of a failed liver transplant in his twenties because he couldn't stop drinking and wore out the new organ. Born to a drug-addicted mother, Billy emerged from the womb craving a fix. Although William wrote with a tough veneer, the death devastated him. Watching a loved one possessed by the demons of addiction is heartbreaking.

Allen Ginsberg struggled to detach from his lifelong lover, Peter Orlovsky, when he drank. "We made a vow to enter Heaven together," Allen said. "It's hard to break that vow."

The radical feminists and recovery police would prefer us to toss guys like Ronnie, Neal, Jack, and John aside. They would chastise Carolyn, Marguerite, and me for our weakness and lack of self-esteem. But it's never that black and white when you love an addict, especially when you stop pointing the finger at their transgressions and look at your own character defects.

Robin Norwood, who wrote the codependency gospel, Women Who Love Too Much, is a pioneer in understanding the nuances of tempestuous relationships. In her subsequent book, Why? she explores the link between childhood wounds and an inclination to attract certain events and people into our lives. To toss John's problems out like yesterday's garbage would only have meant I would have attracted another difficult relationship. In order to clean up the mess in my own psyche, I had to develop stronger boundaries to keep from getting sucked into John's maelstrom. That cannot be done in a vacuum; I need to practice in a relationship.

Norwood goes so far as to question whether the prevention of addiction is even desirable. She claims that although the stakes are high and the price one pays for failure can be immeasurable, addiction can create a pressure which results in personal transformation. I am grateful that there are some veterans of the recovery movement who have emerged with such outrageous insight. I rode astride the razor's edge with John, and although we placed our bets on victory, the odds were on insanity or death, mine or his. As a result, I learned about the true nature of unconditional love. There is a bond so profound that it can surpass the ravages of child abuse, a garbage pail of addictions, and finally, even death. Nine years later, when John embraced sobriety wholeheartedly, he made his amends to me. "My drinking must have taken years off your life. Can you ever forgive me?"

The growing volkisch movement began an active battle against the Jews, the defilers of their blood, reinforced by a pseudo-scholarly writer [Arthur de Gobineau] who satisfied their desire for academic respectability. Rightist Pan-German groups also bolstered their ideology by citing the dubious philosophical, historical, and scientific analyses laid out by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman in love with German culture. He told a mass society, at the mercy of the impersonal forces which were crushing it, that the Teutons were indomitable master builders, that in mysticism was freedom, that "every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite," and that Darwin's theory of natural selection justifies the stricture against mingling of the races. Even before Chamberlain, volkisch thinkers had tried to weave together lessons from history proving the heroism of the ancient Germanic past. Many of them were admirers of the Theosophical Society, which combined for the first time certain elements into a cohesive system considered by some people to be the beginning of modern occultism. The Theosophical Society was organized in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian expatriate countess known to her disciples as H. P. B. At age forty she decided to come to New York to investigate spiritualism, which had become an American craze. She delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe, if they had been presented by traditional organized religions, would not have been credited. But people were perfectly willing to suspend disbelief of a huge Russian countess with magnetic eyes who smoked cigars and used bawdy language.

-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

She delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe.

Excerpted from:

THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN: LIFE WITH JOHN STEINBECK

John had always viewed Rinpoche as the Good Father he never found in Steinbeck. He would write him little notes.

Sir, I want to thank you for steering me in the right direction. There is no way that I can do this without the strong connection and presence of you as you guide my steps. My ego is large. Some people bring it out more than others. I think I know so damned much, but as we both know, the light of my knowledge could not illuminate even a flea's glove compartment in your universe.

Please help me. I am powerless over the need to have others respect what I have seen and learned and this is such a waste of time. It is compulsive and I know where it comes from, but it does me no fine service. Please help me with this in the cause of your skillful means. People treat me with kindness because they see the light of your face on mine. Please let me keep it there for a few more days. I supplicate you in all your forms. Help me be ever mindful of your living presence, as the entire phenomenal world is your dance and delight, without exception.

Hoping Rinpoche could heal his childhood wounds, John thought he had finally found a father figure he could trust.

As Rinpoche's drinking increased, we began to see holes in the fabric of our devotion. During a seminar that summer, Rinpoche was so drunk during his evening talks that several guards had to haul him on and off the stage. One night all he could say was "Be kind to each other. Please, be kind to each other" over and over. It was horrible to see him so inebriated, but it was even more chilling to watch the sycophantic fawning of his henchmen. John and I maintained a healthy sense of discrimination during that period, at the risk of being shunned, as happens in all cults when the student questions. Maybe we had a nose for it, because of all the obsequious behavior that manifests around fame, but we sensed a disturbing quality of delusion both in Rinpoche and his yes-men. Still, we wanted to check out Halifax, where many of our friends had already moved their homes and businesses. We were itching to leave the unreality of Boulder's Disneyesque confines, and hoped Halifax could offer a more cosmopolitan atmosphere.

At first glance, John agreed there was no way on earth those uptight Haligonians with their blue blood, or the peasants who had immigrated from Old Scotia, would ever leave their Church of England or Catholic religions. It was ridiculous to think of them ever becoming Buddhists, as Rinpoche predicted. Thom and John reacted to Halifax as if they'd been thrown in a vat of boiling oil. They were appalled at the slowness of the traffic, dismayed by the last-place-on-earth quality, the utter bleakness. John kicked and bellowed like a bull in a pen.

"There's no damn way I'm going to live here unless I have a guaranteed ticket out at all times. Boulder is provincial enough." We feasted on lobster as our friends showed us around the city. I convinced the captain of a pleasure cruiser to take us around the bay. All he wanted in exchange for the trip was a bottle of scotch. To this day, that poor captain still tells people that he met the Steinbeck brothers and they consumed the entire bottle during the first hour of the voyage. He barely got a drop. John drank vodka that week, which always gave him a bizarre, hallucinogenic high. On our way back to the Maine ferry one night, he suddenly ordered Thom to pull the car over to the side of the road. He leapt out and ran out to the middle of a field, as if he were being chased by bloodhounds. Thom and I sat there, incredulous.

"He has become Mother. The same mood swings and violent emotions," Thom said, shaking his head. Silent minutes passed on the dark, empty road and then Thom called out for him impatiently. John came back subdued, insisting he'd had a religious experience. He'd kicked off his shoes while he was running around the field and was magically led back to the place where they lay. This was an omen, a sign of his liberation. He railed to us about his freedom and what he saw out there in that field. At the hotel, when I couldn't listen any longer, he went next door to Thom's room and raved on. We had no idea what he was even talking about.

From then on, especially when we visited old friends of theirs in upstate New York, Thom would flash me a look that said, "See, now he's where he belongs. You can't touch him here. No girls allowed." Early on, Elaine told me she was stunned by the jealousy Thom exhibited toward me.

"Don't you find it disgusting that a grown man can be so resentful about his brother's girlfriend?" she asked. "Johnny said to me 'Wouldn't you know Thom would be like that?' and I said yes, unfortunately, I knew he had it in him. Does he think he's going to have John cornered for the rest of his life? It's pitiful."

Johnny told me not to take it personally, that Thom was that way with all his women, but it confused and hurt me deeply. I'd see Thom nonverbally putting out the message that I was excluded, and Johnny would be ignoring the whole thing, exuding his own static about Thom's expectations. When all else failed and there was enough booze, things would fold into the sloppy category of We're Steinbecks. I loathed the stale, closed system of Thom's mystique. All I saw were a couple of incredibly wounded bozos posturing like drunken apes, legends in their own minds.

I was starting to lose heart. John's horrible outbursts of anger, which were mostly related to his family, were wearing down my sanity. Not knowing how closely linked they were to his alcoholism, I was utterly confused as to where I fit in. When we were alone, the family baggage would slip off of him like snake skin and he would be at ease, sweet, and loveable.

Years later I saw women making gravel in the streets of Kathmandu, chipping away at a huge stone in the afternoon heat. That's what it felt like. I'd chip and hack and clear away, trying to get to the tender heart I knew was trapped inside John's calcified scar tissue, petrified I wouldn't make it in time. I began to dread that there might be so many obstacles lurking in John's psyche that the task would be impossible. Unfortunately, within the Buddhist community, seeking outside help in the form of therapy was considered taboo. Meditation was touted as the cure-all. When I sought advice within the community, I was given the useless recommendation that I should encourage John to practice meditation, or to sit more myself.

Sometimes his moods manifested as downright sadism. The friends we visited in upstate New York took us to a glider port one afternoon. John put me in the plane and winked to the pilot as he whispered, "Give her a whip stall." I had no idea what that meant, but since Johnny had done a lot of gliding, I figured he wanted to share the experience with me. The plane rose gradually and I was entranced by the graceful airiness of the silent motion. Suddenly, we started going straight up, nose first, tail down and then, without warning, the plane flipped over. As the green fields rushed up to meet us, my stomach felt like it was hurtling through my brain and out the top of my head. Terrified, I said prayers. I thought of the kids, I figured it was the end. And then, as suddenly as the downward lurch had happened, we leveled off easily. The pilot flew on calmly. I broke the silence.

"Did you lose control of the plane?" I cried.

"That was a whip stall, ma'am. Like your husband asked for." I sat stunned, blinking like a toad in hot ashes.

"Have you ever been in a whip stall before?" he asked gently.

"No, I've never even been in a glider before."

"And your husband sent you up without telling you what a whip stall is?"

I nodded.

"Lady, your husband is a sadist. That was a cruel thing to do."

I emerged from the plane, seething. It was the end of our fall foliage tour and the beginning of a giant six-year whip stall in our relationship.

One winter night in 1982, we rented a cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park, thirty miles from Boulder. Because we had started an instant family with our union, there were times when we needed to get away from the children, in hopes of finding ourselves, and our coupleship. We left Megan and Michael with Paul and brought along Sluggo, our Abyssinian kitten. John drank heavily and started his usual late-night monologue, which had been failing to charm me for months. Something about being stuck out there in the snow with him made me feel bone cold and alone. The next morning he woke up, still drunk, and continued where he left off. As we drove home through the mountain forests, the contrast between the purity of the white snow on the firs, the crackling blue sky, and his smelly, degraded appearance made me nauseous. Gone was my noble, aristocratic lover, as well as his wit and urbane manners. I saw an ape, Quasimodo locked in a belfry of oblivion, and my heart recoiled.

When we stopped to walk in the woods, John carelessly placed Sluggo on a tree limb. As the kitten crawled nearly out of reach, I quickly grabbed him. I was annoyed. Would John have let him climb up the other fifty feet to the top, and then what? Would he have waited three days till Sluggo decided to come down or would he leave when it got dark because it was getting cold and then always miss that cute little guy? Or maybe he would create a drama and call the fire department, miles away. Not only was John no longer so much fun to be with, because no one was home, but he was becoming a colossal bore, a time waster, a nuisance, a fool. 1 wanted to scream, "Get a grip!"

When we returned to Boulder, I started making phone calls to find help. I heard that some community members had formed a group which Rinpoche named Sarpashana (Sanskrit for "peacock" because they supposedly transmute poison) to study substance abuse. I asked John to attend a meeting with me, and I told my story of the ride through the forest that day. I was shocked to see people actually crying in sympathy. These alcoholics had started to face their own drinking problems. They were able to identify with my despair. Several shared that they had heard similar reactions from their loved ones. When they put themselves in my place, driving through the glistening snow, completely alienated from John, they were struck with the depth of suffering they were causing in their own lives. They urged me to seek professional counseling at the county-funded Alcohol Rehabilitation Center (the ARC).

Johnny sat there in his inimitable style, listening to every word in sympathy.

"Yep, I'm an alcoholic!" he announced in his typical stand-up fashion. He didn't notice that everyone looked at him as if to say, Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?

"The game is up," I told John when we got home. "I am going to find out what to do about this craziness. I will do whatever is necessary to get some answers, and if that doesn't work, I will leave you."

The fact that he'd recently been arrested for drunk driving kept John from slipping into defensiveness. The judge presiding over the DUI case ordered John to see a psychologist named Carl Sternberg, who specialized in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Carl suggested in addition to his sessions with John, that we do some couples counseling with him and his wife, Benta. While they did teach us some communication skills, the Sternbergs knew nothing about alcoholism. They mistakenly thought they could help in spite of John's drinking. Now, therapists know not to treat someone until they're clean and sober. To this day, the Sternbergs admit, "We blew it with the Steinbecks." Nevertheless, the fact that John was being watched by the law and by two outsiders caused him to modify his behavior.

The turning point came when I started attending Al-Anon meetings, where I saw women who had been married for forty years to alcoholics actually laughing! They had developed a sense of humor about their lives. I wanted what they had and I was willing to go to any lengths to achieve it. John went to court-ordered AA meetings and claimed he enjoyed the camaraderie. As they always did during his periods of sobriety, things started to lighten up.

In fact, we felt so buoyant, we decided to get married. We had been together for three years. If I were going to continue to put my children and my life in John's hands to such an extent, I wanted a real commitment before going any further. John felt it was necessary to cement the work we were doing. "I admire the fact that you can stick with me through this process," he said. I wanted to know why I'd developed that tenacity. Why did I feel like I've been fighting for my life all my life?

28. Apocalypse Now

NANCY

John never allowed me to be sanctimonious about the discrepancy between his wretched excesses and my practicalities. I could not hide behind a Snow White facade, pretending I didn't know why I had landed in the middle of Apocalypse Now.

He's driving me crazy. If only he'd quit drinking, everything would be fine. Reluctantly, I had to admit that was not entirely true. Even if he did get sober, I still had to face my character defects. What qualities in me caused my attraction to a raging alcoholic? I was too loving, too patient, too forgiving. Why did I feel so desperately empty when I thought of life without him?

One winter night, a year after our wedding, I got a phone call at two in the morning. We'd had a fight about John's drinking and he had gone tearing off to Le Bar earlier that evening.

"Mrs. Steinbeck, this is the manager of the Boulderado. Your husband has had an accident. Can you come as soon as possible?"

I threw on a trench coat and drove down streets paved with black ice. Going the wrong way on one ways, I drove recklessly, in a panic, afraid he might be dead. An Al-Anon phrase echoed in my head. The only difference between us and the alcoholic is the smell of our breath.

A fire engine, an ambulance, and two police cars blocked the hotel entrance. Slipping inside the lobby, I stood behind a crowd of bleary onlookers. My precious husband lay crumpled at the foot of a long marble staircase. I heard people say he'd fallen the entire length. The paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher; an oxygen mask covered his demented leer.

I knew if he saw me, he would go off on one of his tirades, so I stayed quietly in the background. For once, I didn't charge in to save the day. Thinking it best if he were left to his own devices, I simply watched. Let him face the consequences of this on his own. As I witnessed myself watching, I experienced the nuts and bolts of genuine detachment.

I called Mitchell Levy, Rinpoche's physician, from a nearby pay phone. He laughed as I told him about the fall. People often reacted to John's highwire act with inappropriate humor, the mark of an untreated alcoholic or codependent. Mitchell said he would meet me at the hospital a few blocks away.

I pulled up in time to see John's stretcher being taken to the emergency room. Floating down the eerie halls in shock, I peeked into the room where they left his gurney. John was sitting upright; the look on his face terrified me. His features were distorted in a manic resemblance of Gwyn, as if she had taken possession of his soul. True to the alcoholic's poisonous duplicity, Johnny, the victimized child, abandoned by his mother's holiday hospital stays, was now sitting in the catbird seat in her favorite vacation spot. Silently peering through the curtain into the darkened room, I saw that horrible no-one's-home look in his eyes, a one-man freak show. Ladies and gentlemen, see the monster impersonate his mother and grandmother in the throes of their dementia. Watch his handsome features change into a macabre mask, his brilliance turn to lunacy before your very eyes. Step right up, but not too close, or he'll turn into a snarling tiger.

I crept home and went to bed. An hour later John came tiptoeing in, meek with chagrin. He wanted to tell me all about it. I begged him to go to sleep, never letting on what I had witnessed. My blood ran cold that night, like the black ice in front of the Boulderado. This was the closest he had come to death since I'd known him. I had heard about the dozen times he had OD'd on heroin, revived by friends. Just a few weeks before, he'd drunkenly run a stop sign and was blindsided by a tow truck which then hauled away his mutilated car. In his denial, he thought of that as an elegant pun.

I saw his crumpled body in my mind's eye as the hours passed into a frigid grey dawn. He could have broken his neck on those marble steps. 1 should sue the bartender and the Boulderado's owner. He probably had been captivating someone with his drunken monologue. Talking to strangers, cavalier, frantic for recognition. Where is this going to end?

In the morning he looked appropriately haunted, and I could tell we had turned a corner into a chilling corridor where some definite choices would have to be made. My mother was reading Betty Ford's autobiography; she explained the notion of intervention. She encouraged me to educate myself more about alcoholism and codependency. The crux of my Al-Anon recovery was to resolve the conflict between their notion of Higher Power and Buddhism's nontheism, no external God, no savior outside yourself. Rinpoche taught that one could only rely upon individual salvation, saving yourself through the practice of meditation and a commitment to discriminating awareness. He laughed at the idea of a God in heaven and claimed Christianity fell short of the truth compared with the notion of emptiness found in Buddhism. One Sunday morning when he first came to Boulder, Rinpoche visited a little chapel in the mountains. As the pastor expressed his pleasure in seeing the Tibetan, our intrepid guru flipped him off. While we laughed at his roguery back then, I now think it was incredibly arrogant and rude.

When John and I left the scene and returned to our childhood concept of divinity, I realized how spiritually bankrupt we all had been. As children, we communed with a Creator, as well as angels, fairies, and lesser gods. To no avail, we had tried to follow the rules of nontheism by fostering devotion to the guru and the teachings, but it never worked. We were greatly relieved when the Dalai Lama explained our spiritual dilemma to us when we met with him later in Costa Rica. "It is not good for a person to change from the religion into which they were born. Very difficult to understand the religion of a foreign culture. Much better to stay with the one you know."


Return to your childhood concept of divinity and see "a" creator (not "The" Creator), angels, fairies,
and lesser gods in "Be Here Now," by Ram Dass

When I quoted a poem by Rinpoche on my Christmas cards one year, my mother was horrified. "Why do you identify with that? It sounds so melancholy." I found it enchanting.

The lonely child
who travels through the fearful waste and desolate fields and
listens to their barren tune, greets as an unknown
and best friend
the terror in him
and he sings in darkness all the sweetest songs. [2]

As Rinpoche divulged the dark secrets of his monastic training, I saw what made my mother shudder, a twisted survivor, like John and me and much of our Buddhist community.

One night, Rinpoche told a particularly gruesome story about his monastic training. His ten-year-old best friend had died. The next day, he was passing by a room where several lamas were gathered. They called him in and asked if he were hungry. A typical Tibetan meal often consists of a hunk of yak meat and some barley bread, so he didn't think anything when they cut off a piece of meat and offered it to him. It tasted a bit strange, but he washed it down with the traditional rancid yak butter tea. A few minutes later, the monks indicated he could go. As he was leaving, one called out to him. "By the way, that was a piece of flesh from the arm of your young friend."

"This was a teaching about the nature of impermanence," he explained, with no emotion. While primitive Tibetan psychology may not view that as an abusively criminal act, some of us did, and we were horrified.

I began to sense that under Rinpoche's rhetoric lay a metaphysical landscape of generic junkie desolation, a justification for the bleak inner world of cocaine, alcohol, and sedative addiction. This was not going to help me define my personal spirituality. Parroting cultist doctrine cannot heal the dis-ease, a rehab term used to encompass all forms of addiction; it is too cunning, baffling, and powerful to be vanquished by liturgy and recitation. I had to find a faith that could sustain me through the darkest night, a sense of sacredness that provided solace in times of crisis and heartbreak. Rinpoche's admonition to live "beyond hope and fear" was a bit too existential for me. Living without fear, yes, but without hope? Why?

As I listened to the people in those Al-Anon meetings, I abandoned the attempts to force the Twelve-Step program into the mold of Buddhist jargon. I had to start from ground zero if I wanted for myself the light I saw shining in those people's eyes. They told me it was a selfish program; I had to shift the focus from John to my dis-ease. We weren't there to discuss the alcoholic. How can you think about anything else? Here he is killing himself and you want me to think about myself? There's nothing wrong with me. Fix him! Why should I change? If he'd quit drinking, everything would be fine.

I saw that by detaching from the alcoholic, I could create health in relationships smothered by obsession. Alcohol enslaved John, but I was just as consumed by his behavior. Whenever I drove crazy, or called around frantically trying to figure out which bar he was under, I might as well have been drunk. The Buddha said all suffering was based upon attachment and craving. Well, John craved alcohol and I was attached to his behavior when he drank by wallowing in my outrage and self-pity. I used the Al-Anon slogans like mantras. Detach with Love. Love the person, hate the disease. Live and Let Live. Let Go and Let God.

I found serenity at those meetings, a peace that I didn't feel among my social-climbing, competitive Buddhist community. Although Rinpoche taught compassion, all I saw were a bunch of people jockeying for political positions and trying to outdo each other with Yuppie aggressive elegance. I watched other Buddhist women come and go, rejecting the Al-Anon program because it referred to God, as we understand Him. I didn't know what to say to them. Lonely and scared, I kept going back, trying to define my Higher Power.

I was asked to do public relations work for the Buddhist community. Proud at first, John became increasingly resentful of the time I was spending away from him, threatened because Al-Anon and work were making me feel more fulfilled. My absence exacerbated the hole inside him. I had been his toy; we had gotten way too enmeshed. By detaching, I was questioning the delicate balance of our marriage and it caused profound discomfort in both of us. I knew with bone certainty that I had to find my passion in life, other than loving him.

Although John dripped with wildly creative ideas, he lacked consistency. I struggled to come up with suggestions to channel his energies, but all he did was talk things to death. When I gave up and began to focus on myself, shifting my priority from his happiness to my fulfillment, he became indignant. Al-Anon calls this King Baby behavior. He was upset with himself because he couldn't find the motivation to occupy his mind with anything else but alcohol and me. No longer willing to be a source of entertainment, the greatest gift I could give John was to be an example of how a sane life is lived. When he finally got sober, John thanked me for my courage to pursue the Al-Anon program. He acknowledged that my inspiration penetrated his denial more than any previous attempts to control his drinking.

I was concerned that John was taking attention away from Megan and Michael, as the addict always does. The focus was always on him, which interfered with the children's development. I had to put their needs before all else. I finally got up the courage to tell John if he didn't get professional treatment, I would leave him. To my amazement, quite docilely, he immediately checked himself into an outpatient program without a fuss. It was a simultaneously excruciating and liberating process, a birthing, for our family. Along with all the other participants, we had to look at our denial, justification, rationalization, minimization, and enmeshment. When John graduated, he maintained two years of sobriety, and we created a life that did not revolve around my fears and his abuses.

29. Magical Thinking

NANCY

As the dust settled on our home front, we could see more clearly into the toxic dynamics that were boiling in the Buddhist community. We began to understand the dangerous trap of magical thinking that surrounds many offshoots of Eastern religions. As my fearless compatriot Andrew Harvey writes in The Direct Path, the "temptation to transcendence is the last, subtlest, and most dangerous of all the temptations to power that appear on the journey to the Divine." [LC-1] Andrew claims that the initial temptation to use occult powers in the domination of others develops into a habitual pattern of "signing off from every kind of earthly responsibility in the name of 'ultimate awareness.'"

Believing that practice and discipline protects them from reality, both students and gurus act as if they are above the law, both civil and universal. Five years later, when Rinpoche's spiritual heir, Tom Rich, revealed his HIV diagnosis, he claimed our guru had told him that if he meditated properly, his unprotected sex would not endanger his partners. Rich proved that theory wrong when he infected a student's son, who died a year later. When Rich died of AIDS in 1990, we heard it was reported in the New York Times that he admitted having over a hundred sexual partners of both sexes, after learning he had AlDS. Senior Vajradhatu officials who knew this did nothing to stop him. According to the Times, Rich said that he thought his sexual partners were protected by the magical power he had received from his lineage.

Another form of magical thinking can be seen in Rinpoche's coked-out fantasies, which were responsible for turning the scene into a Mikado-like parody of courtly intrigue. He created a political mandala, with himself as king, surrounded by his henchmen. The all-male board of directors were adorned by their wives and secretaries. Only one woman had managed to rise to the highest rank, and I was her assistant. The source of a woman's power was her beauty or her husband's position. We were supposed to be building a utopian community. How was this different from corporate America? Fluent in a variety of languages, cultures, and religions, John and I shared an international consciousness. We considered ourselves to be citizens of the world and he raged against the provincial atmosphere.

Unfortunately, when there's a center, there's a fringe. Those who couldn't be at the hub because they didn't have the right stuff were comforted by the party line that a mandala needs people at the periphery. Secretly, they were called Fringies, derided in sneering whispers, like high school nerds. They were promised that if they practiced and volunteered enough, they could ascend to huddle near the chosen few who had the money, glamour, and panache.

According to Tibetan prophecy, When the iron bird flies and horses ride on rails, then the Dharma will come to the west. Rinpoche's pioneering efforts transplanted Tibetan Buddhism to North America. While he did not believe that the feudal monastic model was viable in the West, he couldn't come up with anything more original than the archaic mannerisms of the British monarchy for his "enlightened society." As courtiers, we were encouraged to give lavish dinner parties, fund-raisers, and formal affairs. He urged us to develop livelihoods that would give the community a strong economic base. Just as I'd deduced in my hippie days, our trappings camouflaged a bourgeois small-mindedness as the lemmings struggled to top each other with expressions of elegant opulence. Every house was a replica of Rinpoche's Court, with white carpets, white walls, and the requisite amount of calligraphies and Tibetan art hanging on the walls. While I loved wearing formal gowns and Johnny looked gorgeous in tails, it was like an endless beauty contest for who had the most exquisite clothes, luxurious houses, and extravagant dinner parties. The lack of spirit and conversational depth began to bore us. Once again, we had sought utopia and discovered dystopia. John and I were tired of the petty bureaucrats, phoney yes-men, arrogant intellectuals and their materialistic wives.

Naropa became an accredited university and Rinpoche continued to hold seminars. A program of Buddhist social services was created and any involvement with Boulder community services was highly discouraged. Problems such as alcoholism or mental illness were to be dealt with by the community rather than by outside therapists or AA. The party line was that unless we approached these issues from a Buddhist perspective, we wouldn't find help. This only served to seal the communal pain and family secrets. It was the blind leading the blind, with lay people claiming meditation could heal every problem. Now there is evidence that meditation can actually exacerbate emotional problems, and may even prove dangerous.

Our lawyer and friend, Duncan Campbell, was grappling with the same issues. He recommended Alice Miller's Thou Shalt Not Be Aware as the necessary Draino for our collective denial. She wrote about children who have been disempowered by abuse, growing up in a system where the parents punish them for making the smallest critical observation. Just as their rebellion is met with parental ostracism, this dynamic is later replicated when they attach themselves to a cult. We were attracted to a system that appeared to be antithetical to the rules of our childhood. We learned new customs, rituals, and languages that were completely beyond our parents' reality. As Miller points out, members of the group experience a sense of maternal warmth never felt before. This is how it should have felt had there been a healthy symbiosis with our own mothers. However, every form of addiction, instead of fulfilling the old longing, merely perpetuates the tragedy by repeating the dependency, which in our case was the community and the guru.

Then came the savage blow. We discovered our church was replicating the exact harmonic of our original families. Only this time, instead of our parents, the Buddhist community silenced anyone who questioned with the threat of ostracism. This created a similar anxiety to the infant who risks losing love by inappropriate behavior. This dynamic keeps even the most intelligent members from leaving the group. In our community, questions were often met with a condescending sneer. "How much do you practice?" Dissenters were told, "You're solidifying your ego."

Some guy would flip out because his wife was having an affair and six Buddhists would take him aside and lay that one on him, which always appalled me. I preferred the reaction of the great Tibetan translator, Marpa. When his son died, he wailed and moaned for days.

"Marpa," a puzzled student asked, "you claim the phenomenal world is an illusion, including suffering. Why do you let this bother you so much if it's only an illusion?"

"Because, you idiot, this is super-illusion," he roared.

So you wake up one morning, on a hippie commune or a Tibetan spiritual community, and suddenly you hear the same words your parents used to exert control. Someone else is telling you they know better. They have the answers. They got your power and you weren't even looking. See, you've always been a mess. You'll never get the point. Just do it our way, and you'll be fine, because ours is the only way.

Recovery from religious abuse requires as much courage and tenacity as recovery from drug abuse. When we understood the scene's fascist tactics, we experienced a profound existential crisis that eventually led to our spiritual maturity. Using the perseverance which spilled over from our efforts to hold our family together, we applied the reserves to heal the wounds from our toxic community. But the withdrawal process and subsequent discovery of our personal spirituality was a long and painful journey.

Tibetan Buddhists believe that a student cannot progress on the spiritual path without the guru's blessing. Even if you never practice or study, they claim that obstacles will be cleared and you can attain enlightenment solely by remaining devoted to the guru. However, even if a teacher is guilty of murder or sexual misconduct, once you have become his student, you cannot slander him, examine his qualities, or do anything but treat him with reverence and devotion. This primitive belief system teaches that if you criticize a guru, you will go straight to hell. According to scripture, those who lack faith in the guru will be seen as enemies. They will be everyone's target of abuse.

Initially, John was valued by the community for the feather his name put in their caps. He overheard one of the directors tell a fund-raiser, "Kiss up to Steinbeck. He's got money." They found intriguing similarities between John and Rinpoche, their drinking, the way women threw themselves at both men, their brutal honesty and compassion. John acted out the communal shadow side in his drunken escapades. As long as he was out there, walking point, dancing on the edge, they didn't have to face their darkness. When he began to question the politics, he was dismissed as recalcitrant. And I was often blamed for corrupting him.

When we quit playing the Emperor's New Clothes, many longtime friends turned on us. One of John's drinking buddies, Jack Niland, had previously treated me like Yoko Ono for removing John from the Sex Czar circuit. Jack didn't have the courage to confront John directly, but he confided to me that he was appalled when John told him he got down on his knees and prayed every morning and evening after joining AA.

"Buddhists don't pray!" Jack sputtered. "What does he pray to?"

"That's what keeps him sober," I explained. "He's talking to a power greater than himself and he's finding out exactly what that power is."

Jack's alcoholism was clearly threatened. "I can't even hang out with you guys without breaking my vows," he ranted, referring to the edict that it was dangerous to listen to heresy about the guru. "You say terrible things about Rinpoche."

"Like what?"

"That he's an alcoholic."

"You mean a medical diagnosis is not allowed?" I asked incredulously.

When I repeated the conversation to Johnny, he rolled his eyes. "Just ignore him. He's been invaded by the Body Snatchers. It's pitiful." They never spoke again.

32. Impermanence

NANCY

It took awhile for us to come down from the trip to Sikkim. Things seemed to be going along as usual, but as I look back on it now, full-tilt denial was reigning. John would stay up late most nights, listening to the shortwave radio or reading by the fire. Sometimes when he'd come up to bed, he seemed out of it. Whenever I asked him, he would say he was sleepy.

In the mornings, Gopal cooked breakfast. We'd say good-bye to the children after Serita had gotten them ready for school. John would fall back to sleep till noon. That gave me many hours of privacy to write in my office or practice my ngondro. We loved that routine. One mind could go off on myriad flights while the other one slept close by. One could sleep feeling totally safe because the other was there as guardian of their dreams.

Once or twice while we'd been living at the Vajra Hotel, when John seemed a bit lethargic, I suspected he had been smoking dope. After we moved to the house, a nagging feeling grew as I noticed changes in his behavior. He began to make daily trips to the Supermarket, Kathmandu's funky version of a mall. I hated the rows of tiny stalls that hawked a myriad of Western goods, mostly smuggled from Thailand and Hong Kong. The air was atomized by the pungent aroma of Nepalese plumbing. Supermarket epitomized Western greed, the window displays full of pirated cassette tapes, wristwatches, and electronic gadgetry. It was easy to score drugs there. A sly Nepali would stroll close and whisper, "Hi, you want hashish, cocaine, heroin, LSD?" If you didn't respond, he'd simply disappear in the crowd.

John started buying compulsively. Sometimes he would buy two of one thing, like the tiny Pentax cameras he brought home one day. "His and Hers," he quipped. I began to feel sad, because his life was revolving around long sleeps, visits to Supermarket, and isolated late nights. I didn't know enough about the signs of relapse to call this a symptom.

One night, my dream voice told me, Get out of bed and go downstairs. I came upon John as he was inhaling white powder from a magazine into a half-emptied cigarette. When he saw me standing in the door, he deftly flipped the magazine under the couch and smiled hello.

"What are you doing?"

"Just staring at the fire."

"What are you smoking?"

"A cigarette."

"I'm going back up to bed, and when you want to get honest with me, come up and talk." I turned and left the doorway, frozen with panic and fear. My denial dropped like a nickel in a winning slot machine.

He came right up to the bedroom and took my hand. "I'm really sorry you had to see that, but I'm glad you caught me. I've been smoking cocaine. I want to quit." It had been so long since I'd had to think about his abuses. I had been basking in months of heavenly freedom from the cunning, baffling tricks of drug addiction. Horrified and enraged, I mustered enough inspiration for a straight up Al-Anon number.

"You know what to do to quit. So, do it." I didn't rave, I didn't shame, but I let him know it had to stop immediately, foolishly thinking he had control. That's what he wanted me to believe, and I didn't know any better, yet.

Two days passed and he seemed normal. On the third day, I walked into the bedroom and entered a hell where I would dwell for the next four years. John was lying backward in the bed, naked, with his feet propped up against the huge plate-glass window. His legs were jerking spasmodically. His feral eyes didn't register recognition. Hallucinating and angry, like a trapped animal, he looked right through me. There were puddles of diarrhea on the floor. I ran downstairs and called our American doctor. It was Friday afternoon and he was on his way to a wedding reception. I begged him to come to the house immediately and alerted the staff.

"Sahib is very ill. Please take care of the children when they get back from school."

When the doctor arrived, I told him about the cocaine John had been smoking.

"Are there any drugs in the house now?" he asked.

"I don't think so."

"It may be a paratyphoid that's going around. High fever, delirium. You need to get someone to sit up with him tonight."

"Could it be withdrawal from cocaine? Can he be admitted to a hospital?"

"You don't want your husband in the Kathmandu hospital," he shook his head ruefully. "It's filthy and inadequate."

As the doctor gave John a sedative, my heart turned to stone. We were set to leave Nepal in two weeks, immediately after the school semester ended. Since our tenant's lease on the house in Boulder was not up for another month, we planned two weeks of sightseeing in Delhi, Rome, and Paris. How could we travel with this animal thrashing around, shitting on the floor? There was no way I could handle John on my own. Like a blind shark, he couldn't see me, but he smelled my terror and it made him murderous.

Frantically, I thought of a plan. The doctor's American partner was a friend of ours, married to a very tall man who had interviewed John for the tourist magazine he published. That's what I needed, an English-speaking doctor who could monitor John's symptoms and a large man to restrain him. I sensed I could count on them for help; they were ardent born-again Christians.

"Here's what I want," I said briskly. "Ask your partner and her husband to come spend the night here with John. I'm taking the kids to the Sheraton until he recovers."

We could hear him upstairs, slamming into walls. I asked the doctor to wait till Ken and Kathy arrived, packed up the children, and sent Gopal for a taxi. When Dr. Kathy and her husband arrived, we were ready to go. To my relief, Kathy agreed it sounded like drug withdrawal.

Ensconced at the nearby Everest Sheraton, we ordered room service and played cards, desperately trying to establish a ground of sanity in the midst of our shock. I had given the children a brief sketch of John's behavior, sparing them the ugly details. Long after Michael and Megan had fallen asleep, I stared across the rice fields at our darkened house. I was afraid John would die that night, perhaps sever an artery on the plate-glass window he'd been kicking. Filled with rage, terror, and a sense of betrayal, suddenly our safe little kingdom seemed hideously foreign. The exotic trappings mocked me with their inability to speak to the situation.

I prayed for protection and guidance all night. In the morning, Ken called and said it was safe to come home. To my great relief, the minute I walked into the bedroom I could tell John was himself. He apologized for putting me through the horror. Sometimes he had a candid way of copping to a situation. He did it with such bare-bones honesty that you could tell he meant it from the bottom of his heart. Whenever I heard that particular bottomed-out tone of voice, I would find the resilience to stay for one more day.

"That wasn't cocaine I was smoking," he cautioned me. "I'm withdrawing from heroin." When he got honest like that, I'd hear the plea for help, the plea not to abandon him, the plea to stay and fight the demons with him. There was still something so precious inside him. I could not walk away, not yet.

Kathy and Ken told me he had thrashed around the room all night. Thinking the antidote to his confusion was hidden in his glasses, he took a bite out of the right lens. Our wonderful Christian friends had stayed by his side, praying. Toward dawn, Kathy had gone into the bathroom and saw a huge black spider, the size of a tarantula, on the wall. Ken rushed in and killed it when he heard her scream. We looked at each other, but we didn't say it. Something evil had descended upon our home. The Steinbeck Black Hole was back.

"There's a Swedish guy named Ollie across town who runs a makeshift rehab for Westerners," Ken said. He suggested I go over there and see if they could detox John as an alternative to the dreaded hospital. Gopal went up the street to find a cab. I was relieved to have some direction, but it was a useless trip.

Ollie painted a bleak picture about John's condition. "He cannot travel. He could relapse into psychosis at any minute. You will have to leave him here with me." Several vacant- eyed hippies wandered past, lobotomized by street drugs. I remembered the young American Buddhist scholar who had lost his mind during our stay at the Vajra. I came upon him wandering, demented, in an alley behind the hotel. The desk clerk called the police, but even after several days in jail, the young man's mind was nowhere to be found. I arranged to have him sent back to the States by the consulate. It's funny how the universe trains in disaster preparedness. I was often given a dry run for the emergencies I faced to save John's life. Back in the taxi, I knew what I had to do.

This is why all our expatriate friends insist they have to return to the West at least once a year. How ironic that Mr. World Traveler is the first to succumb to Lord Jim jungle rot. We've got trouble in paradise here. We cannot linger under the pagodas a minute longer. Mother Asia is about to boot us out of our magical kingdom like a tigress. We need a clean hospital and a drug-treatment facility, American-style.

I felt myself grow bitter. I had traveled alone across the valley to Ollie's and returned to the house, alone. Alone, I begged John to go to the hospital, no matter how primitive the conditions. It was the only place I could put him where he would have no access to street drugs in order to continue his withdrawal. Alone, I got him a semiprivate room, though the procedure took five hours. During the interview, John told the nurse he had not done drugs since Vietnam. I was incensed. "Why are you lying to her? She's not a cop. She's trying to get you some help!"

John had a down parka with velcro pockets where he stashed his comb, cigarettes, lighter, and pens. When he was stoned, he'd spend hours searching his pockets, muttering to himself. He would start slapping his sides to feel for the item that had suddenly become urgently necessary. Ripping open each pocket, he'd desperately try to find whatever he was missing. You'd hear the velcro scratched apart, but within three pockets he'd forget what he'd been looking for due to short-term memory loss. The rest of the search was merely the death throes of his mind trying to remember what he wanted. He'd go through the annoying routine, first looking for a comb, then a lighter, then a pen ad nauseam. I sat there wondering if he'd be frozen in the Great Velcro Hunt for the rest of his life. He looked utterly demented. I wanted to scream. A handsome, red-robed lama passed by with an attractive Nepali woman and a small child in tow, and I distracted myself by making up a clandestine romance about them in my mind. To this day, the sound of undoing velcro sends shivers up my spine.

Years later, R. D. Laing's widow, Marguerite, shrieked with laughter when I told her that story. Ronnie would do the same thing, often at odd ends of the globe. Sometimes she'd pretend she wasn't with him, or that she was a hired nurse. "A drooler," she'd chortle. "An absolute gonzo drooler!"

John shared a hospital room with a dying elderly Tibetan. His entire family was camping out on the floor, cooking, chatting, grieving. Several days later, after he died, they replaced him with a raving American hippie who was coming down off speedballs. That guy never shut up.

"He's annoying, but he's also a lesson," John said meekly. "There but for the grace of your intervention."

Michael confirmed his words as we left the hospital. "You know, Mom, if it weren't for us, John would be just like that crazy guy." We noticed they had given John and the hippie the same diagnosis, Psychosis/Diarrhea, posted on the door.

Unfortunately, the Nepali form of detox was enough Valium to arouse John's disease to full-blown proportions. Although he was quite chipper when he left the hospital a week later, I sensed the desperate animal scratching under his skin. My blood ran cold watching him do his Maurice Chevalier number as he said good-bye to the nurses. Terrified to return home for fear the Black Hole was still lurking, I had remained at the Sheraton with Megan and Michael. As John and I entered our bedroom for the first time since that harrowing event, a terrible weakness possessed me. The demons were still there. I collapsed on the bed and spat out, "This place makes me sick. Once again, you have turned our home into a bedpan. We've still got a week before our flight to Delhi. I'm going to a hotel till we leave Nepal. I am never setting foot in this house again."

Instead of the impersonal Sheraton, I purposely chose the Dwarika Hotel, owned by a stern, no-nonsense woman who was also the Swiss consulate. I knew that the Spartan atmosphere would force John to keep it together until our departure. I breathed a sigh of relief when I noticed she didn't grovel over his name as he signed the register. My instincts had been right; she maintained a suspicious distance from us, and I didn't blame her.

That was when I lost my will. Dysentery swept over me, wringing ten pounds off my body. I lay in bed delirious, filled with hatred and resentment for John. I wouldn't talk to him. I was outraged that he could mindlessly trash our precious time in Nepal. Had I been more practiced in Al-Anon's wisdom, I would not have ranted at him for spoiling my heaven. I would have tried not to shame him. It would take me years to understand that heaping guilt on an addict only prevents him from feeling the full effect of his own remorse. The self- discipline of a veteran Al-Anon is staggering, and I was still a novice.

Just before we left Boulder, I asked Rinpoche for advice about the trip. He predicted that we would be forced to come home prematurely. Throughout the year, part of me had stayed vigilant, wondering what he meant. Now I understood.

John's liver-function tests showed a high level of uric acid, which, along with the drugs, explained his erratic behavior. I was desperate for the comfort of my support group in Boulder. Despite the fact that we still had two weeks to kill until we could return home, I felt that returning to the Western world would ease the burden of being in a country that had no understanding of John's condition. I was also concerned about the color of his skin. He had turned a peculiar shade of greenish bronze, which delighted the Tibetans. "Oh," they'd exclaim, stopping him on the street. "You look just like us."

By the time our plane left Kathmandu, I felt as relieved to be leaving Shangri-la as I had longed every day to stay there forever. I also felt curiously victorious. John often quoted Kipling, something about how you can't hustle the East. I hadn't. Facing the challenge of making myself at home in that relentlessly foreign culture, I had succeeded in finding and befriending myself. I had written, explored, and practiced. I quit smoking because the Nepali tobacco tasted like burning yak hair, and I discovered a wellspring of sanity and cheerfulness in my being. I had learned how to travel the world, and had transmitted that ability to my children, so that wherever we are on this planet, we feel at home. I was proud of myself. Compared to Mr. I've-Been-Around-the-World-Four-Times, I felt grace about my Nepali life, as opposed to his disgraceful undoing.

On our last night in Kathmandu, Khentse Rinpoche blessed our thankas, Tibetan scroll paintings. We had seen Khentse many times in Boulder and visited with him whenever he came to Nepal. He was one of the last great lamas, dripping compassion like a fat mother sow. We brought along our Tibetan friend, Tsering, whom we had met at the Phokara refugee camp. He was in awe of Khentse, as if he were the Wizard of Oz.

As Khentse printed the traditional sacred symbols of empowering mantras on the backs of the painting, I thought long and hard about this man's supposed wisdom. Here I am in the presence of a great lama. What does he know about heroin addiction? What advice could he give me about traveling with John? He did not dwell in the realm where opium poppies grew. I was on my own.

Where did all that magic and mystery get us in the end? There would be no miracles ahead, not for years, as John's disease progressed like wildfire. What good was any of it, I wondered, as I saw Tsering act as if he weren't worthy to be in the same room with Khentse. He had even gone outside to wash his feet in the dewy grass before entering the shrine room.

Was I hypnotized by the Valley, seduced by the fervid religiosity that hangs in the air? Is everyone in the Silver Jade Kingdom buzzed by a confluence of spirits, high on the realm where Absolute Truth can never bend so low as to touch Relative Suffering? What good has all the bliss and peace done? We are worse off than when we started. In the depths of my dilemma, I forgot how slowly evolution works, like the rings around a tree trunk.

John wanted to stick to our plan of sightseeing until the lease on our house was up. More crippled than any previous time in our lives together, we limped through Delhi. In my grief process, I had moved through shock and rage in Kathmandu. Depression settled in Delhi, where it was so hot, the hotel swimming pool was a tepid soup. One afternoon, friends from Boulder came to take me to lunch as John rested. At last, I could share our crisis with a Western mind. They were appalled at what I had gone through and the unknown territory that lay ahead. Nevertheless, when her Tibetan husband left the table, Betty whispered, "Noedup is having a hard time relating to John because he's not drinking. He feels awkward." I felt surrounded by lunacy.

Wanly, I tried to enjoy the Raj atmosphere at the Imperial Hotel. The children and I set off valiantly every day to sightsee. Unbeknownst to us, that's when John would duck down to the nearest drugstore to purchase over-the-counter Valium. I smelled a rat when I noticed he was buying compulsively again and seemed groggy. Five pairs of eyeglasses and twenty dress shirts later, we were up at 3:00 A.M. for our flight to Rome. On our way to the airport, with a set jaw and a sinking feeling, I did get one last exotic hit as we passed six camels walking down the freeway, bound for the marketplace. As John slipped into the duty-free shop with Megan, Michael and I went on to board the plane. Mercifully, we were flying business class, with long reclining seats and more clout than steerage, as I discovered when I had to ask the flight attendant to hold the plane till John appeared.

If the slogans say "Let go and Let God" or "Live and Let Live," would I be practicing Al- Anon if I let the plane take off without John? Had Megan not been with him, I might have risked it. I could not ignore the aching certainty that if John and I didn't make it back to Boulder together, he would die.

Rome was the worst. The minute we got off the plane, John started playing Papa Steinbeck-on-a-trip-with-his-family. Surreptitiously scoring more Valium, he postured and posed on the boulevards and in hotel lobbies. I wanted to strangle him. As we showed the children the Colosseum, the Forum, the Catacombs, John blamed his grogginess on "Italian vegetable tranquilizers." He fell asleep wherever we stopped, in restaurants, on benches, on the grass near the Palatine Hill. The children were embarrassed and confused. I explained as best I could, and cursed the fact that we were stuck in tourist limbo until our lease was up.

To my relief, I discovered Rome had Al-Anon meetings. In my broken understanding of Italian, the words I heard helped me formulate a plan. One night, a heavy dose of Valium triggered a heroin flashback in John. Delirious, sleepwalking, he arose and pissed in the corner of our pensione bedroom. I woke to the stench.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for the bathroom," he muttered sheepishly. He stopped mid-stream, went over to the toilet, and pissed all over it. I reached out to feel his forehead when he got back in bed. He wasn't feverish. He was tripping. I was alone again, except for my prayers. I thought of calling Thom and Elaine, but I knew they'd be of no help. They'd probably tell me to leave him here and I don't want to explain that I can't. In the morning, I phoned the American Embassy. They sent over an English-speaking doctor. By this time John was drooling, burning cigarette holes in the sheets. The doctor talked him into going to a mental hospital, which he euphemistically referred to as a sanitarium.

We set out in a taxi for Belvedere Montello, in the Roman suburbs. As a discreet attendant took John up to his room, I noticed it was a locked facility. That was not going to sit well with him, but his moods were no longer my problem. As I filled out the insurance papers, the head psychiatrist asked about John's name.

"Oh, the son of Steinbeck!" he crooned rhapsodically.

That and a nickel will get you to the point where you need your own rubber room, you idiot.

"Would you like to go up and see his quarters and say good-bye?" he asked graciously. I could tell he hadn't understood one iota of what I had been through in the last two weeks. It wasn't a language problem. He was so mesmerized by the Steinbeck thing, he couldn't hear me. Disgusted, I had to repress the urge to scream, No! He's all yours. You can wipe up the drool and the shit and venom. I'm out of here.

The poor shrink seemed to think I should be kissing the ground John walked on because of his father. "We'll take very good care of him," the good doctore promised, as if John were a living treasure. I stood with the children at the gate, waiting for the electronic buzzer to open the lock. It was an old palazzo and the grounds were beautiful, but the empty swimming pool gaped forlorn and abandoned, like the puzzled inmates who wandered amongst the voluptuous statuary.

During John's stay, I was determined the children would not miss out on any of the Roman history, art, or culture, no matter what we had been through. We wandered around the city, trying to be cheerful in the face of grave worries. In the evening we would visit him.

On the fourth day, Johnny wanted to come back to the pensione with us, promising Signor Doctore he would return by dinner. John had enough wits about him to sense we needed to spend time alone. We left the children on a street they wanted to explore and arranged for them to meet me under a tall clock on the corner.

John and I sat at a sidewalk cafe near the Spanish Steps and kept our conversation in the moment, as we always did after those fiascos. My rage was worn to a nub; I wanted to share Rome with my aristocratic Johnny and forget about the gonzo drooler. He asked me to ride back to the sanitarium so we could linger in an embrace. The world wasn't feeling exactly like my oyster, but hope springs eternal in the heart of a rookie Al-Anon.

Terror returned when I couldn't find the children at the appointed clock tower. I had a feeling something was terribly wrong, and I wasn't sure if they remembered the name of our hotel. The taxi driver shared my concern. We drove up and down the long boulevard three times. "Madonna," he would exhale under his breath, praying as if he had lost his own children. Finally, an hour later, he remembered there were two identical clock towers on that street. We found my poor waifs, looking like abandoned kittens. That's it. I'm not going to be an idiot anymore. We are strangers still, in a strange land, and if I don't stay on top of things, disaster will strike. Nothing is going to come between me and the children during the rest of this trip, not even John's ridiculous flirtation with death. Thank God they are with me again, safe and sound. They are the only sanity I have in the swamp of John's dementia and my own frenzy.

Upon his return that evening, John finagled a Valium drip. Several days later, he insisted on leaving against the doctor's orders. To my dismay, when I came to pick him up, he was more loaded then when he'd entered. I didn't bother confronting doctore's ineptness in dealing with drug withdrawal. This would not be the first time I experienced John coming out of a hospital detox flying on tranquilizers. Tests showed severe liver damage, which they feared may have permanently affected his brain. His ammonia levels were six times higher than normal, causing confusion and bizarre behavior. The doctors told me if John left, he could go into tranquilizer withdrawal and, combined with the ammonia levels, he might end up in a coma. True to his death-dance, John stubbornly refused further treatment. I knew it was hopeless to convince him otherwise; the animal was surfacing again, scratching at his skin, clawing its way out. He glared at me, daring a confrontation so he could rip me apart with his vicious blame as if the situation were my fault. Denial and blame is the name of his game.

I was beginning to understand the tightrope act he played with me, how he watched my safety net with cunning. When the net got pulled, he actually became quite docile. This gave me the courage to insist he find another hotel for the night. I simply could not bear the pressure of being responsible for his health for one moment longer. I needed a break, even if he went into a coma during the night. He meekly checked into a hotel down the block, oblivious to my worries and prayers for his safekeeping through the lonely, sleepless hours. I thought bitterly of all the times Thom had cruelly mocked my pleas for John to stop drinking and drugging. If I called Thom, he would only protest that he is not his brother's keeper. Why is it solely up to me to grapple with this madness? Let go and let God ... grant me the serenity ... the courage and wisdom ....

In the morning, I woke to a knock at the door. Certain it was the police with the worst possible news, a sheepish John surprised me.

"I'm ready to get off Valium. I can detox on my own." I burst into tears, grateful he had made it through the night. Secretly, I noted that a healthy dose of Al-Anon detachment can work wonders.

After several blessedly uneventful days, we felt brave enough to take the train south to Positano. Steinbeck had taken Thom and John there and he wanted to relive the memories. It was a glorious train ride, and I prayed the tide might be turning as our hired car glided along the Amalfi coast, past pink stone villas dappled by the afternoon sunlight.

Unfortunately, our hotel's manager was another one of those fawning spinsters. Like a moth to flame, I watched her fan the dying embers of John's ego. Within two days, he was back to aping his father, parading up and down the village streets as if he had just won the Nobel Prize. To add to the masquerade, when the tourist department filled our room with flowers in memory of Steinbeck's visit twenty years ago, John confused the gesture with adulation toward himself. For what? An award for pissing in the corners of assorted Roman pensiones? As I quietly watched John forget where he stopped and his father started, I decided it was time to remove myself physically, come what may. The culture shock of having left our magical kingdom and the burden of John's health was driving me insane.

Once we were back in Rome, I sensed John wanted more over-the-counter Valium. I sought a direction. I had been a Thomas Mann buff in college, and wanted to see the places described in Death in Venice. Knowing John disliked Venice's tourist trap aspect, I chose to escape there with the children for several days. Although I was haunted by the chaos of our situation, I started piecing together a sense of reality. We still had ten days to kill before our tenant moved out. It was up to me to orchestrate them. I decided we would meet John in Paris and limp through France for a while.

On the last night in Venice, he called me, freaking out. "I bought some gorgeous Fumi jewelry for your birthday. I showed it to the concierge yesterday. When I woke up, it was gone." He had ripped the room apart and then accused the hotel staff. "I told them I was going out for breakfast and when I got back, the stuff better be in my room." They must have figured he meant it, because when he returned, they claimed to have found it under the mattress.

Although he never made it there, John referred to those final days in Europe as his Death in Venice period. To me, Gustav with his makeup and his sirocco had nothing on John's disintegration. For some reason, the missing jewelry incident shocked John into staying sober in Paris. The withdrawal symptoms, along with his liver disease, had exhausted him. The city was crawling with tourists, but I managed to show the children the important sights. We spent hours at the Louvre. After a morning at the Jeu de Pommes art museum, John met us there for lunch. I caught sight of him strolling through the park, wearing an elegant new three-piece suit, lost in the fantasy of being a great writer, swinging his umbrella to the rhythm of his boulevardier strut. When he saw us, he seemed to wake from a dream. We knew only too well who he was, and the familiarity disoriented him.

By the time we arrived in New York, I was racing to get John to his physician. Something was terribly wrong, more than the progression of his addictions. His mind was not functioning. Usually his thought process was stellar, no matter how many chemicals he ingested. His skin had a peculiar bronze cast. It took ten days to receive the diagnosis. They told us he had liver cancer; that it would be a matter of weeks before he was dead. They ordered a biopsy and John immediately locked himself up with a case of Johnny Walker in the Boulderado, hoping to beat death's agenda. His doctor, with the bedside manner of Leona Helmsley, ordered me to prepare for widowhood.

33. 1984

NANCY

It was now midway into 1984, and Orwell's predictions were coming true. Ever since reading this book in college, I felt something prophetic about that year. Sensing danger if Newspeak and Big Brother ever became reality, it would be an indication we were crossing over into a bankrupt lifestyle that would endanger the planet. A collective surrender of individual power would doom the spirit, the artist, and the lover.

Having been abroad for a year, I was more sensitive to Western speed, complaisance, and somnambulism. The signs were eerily familiar. The smokey wisps of thoughts that had arisen in my twenties were converging into the eye of a gathering hurricane, fueled by the ecological predictions of ancient prophecies -- Aztec, Hopi, Hippie, Aboriginal, and Marian.

Ten years prior, during the winter of 1974 in British Columbia, I devoured Doris Lessing while the kids slept. Paul was working on the railroad, often gone for days. Imprisoned by blizzards, I melted snow for drinking water, bathing, and washing dishes; fed the woodstove with huge arm loads of firewood; and periodically shot at a chicken hawk to protect our hens. Whenever Megan and Michael would go down for a nap, or sleep at night, I'd curl up with The Four-Gated City or The Golden Notebook and when I put down the books, the visions would come.

I saw a time when adolescent gangsters terrorized society. Driven by tribal instincts, they marauded the cities. I saw the graffiti and guns. I experienced a deep sense of their rage and numbness about the breakdown of a culture where greed and selfishness twisted traditional values. I foresaw a bleakness so horrible that no amount of gentrification or police could stop the spread of their slash-and-burn mentality.

When Megan and Michael woke, I returned to the mundane tasks of baking bread, sewing on the ancient Red Bird treadle machine, carding and spinning raw wool. Dying the skeins with golden onionskins, brown walnut husks, and orange madder root in the glacial waters of Kootenay Lake, I wove blankets to keep us warm under the heavy lead skies.

I had apocalyptic visions of hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. I kept asking why, and the answer was always the same. It is the only way to wake people up to the planet's destruction and the severing of their spirit. Haunted by those visions, I prayed that when the time came, I would be surrounded by a tribe of strong and trustworthy friends.

I dwelt in two worlds that winter and never came out of them. I can cross the bridge between the visionary and the ordinary, but I will never abandon one for the other. I have never married for money, never made a decision solely based on security. Living on the edge of choicelessness, I take things to the limit until a way out appears. You have to know this about me to understand what I went through for the next four years with John's drinking. Beyond the unconditional love, beyond the abject codependent flip side, much of my stick-to-it-iveness boiled down to Johnny's "shit happens" attitude, rock solid in the face of adversity. I wanted him there for the coming rites of passage, the death of my father, the kids' adolescence, watching Rinpoche kill himself with alcohol. As a friend once said, "John had more clarity and creativity in his little finger, drunk or sober, than most people have in lifetimes."

John was in a panic over the cancer prognosis. Since he couldn't drink himself to death at our house, he checked into the Boulderado. When he failed to show up for his scheduled liver biopsy, the hospital called me. I found him in his hotel room, bleary, reeking, and disoriented. He let me convince him to keep his appointment. If that smacks of enabling, I don't care. God knows when he'll find the courage to face this on his own. When we have the results of the biopsy, he can get treatment. If he's going to die, I'll quit fighting for his life and figure out what to do with the rest of mine.

This was the start of my bottom. I had failed to convince John to stay sober, and now it looked like death was going to solve that problem for both of us. Outraged in the face of this final abandonment, I was turning another corner, cold as ice, clinical, and dispassionate. As the biopsy needle probed John's liver, I saw the work that lay ahead. I had attracted abusive people, typical of an incest survivor. Al-Anon was teaching me to leave them in the dust if they didn't earn my loyalty, and John might be one of them.

After the biopsy, he came home and soberly waited three days for the result, docile and considerate of my anxiety. Whenever the dust settled between us, John tried to cover all the bases. Mr. Hyde, doing whatever he damned well pleased, gave way to tenderness and nurturing. I felt like a snake charmer, waiting for music to lull the viper.

"You must have been a great yak herder in a previous lifetime," he teased. "You know just how much rope I need to hang myself."

The initial scan had shown a black spot on John's liver that the doctors thought was a cancerous tumor. When the biopsy report came back, it took us a couple of days to recover from the shock, and then we laughed at the results. Fecal matter inexplicably had shown up in the CAT scan.

"It was a piece of shit! They put me through all that anxiety over a lousy piece of shit!" he groused, half humorously. So much for his tumor and imminent death. They did have a diagnosis, however. They called it hemochromatosis, a genetic condition in which the body absorbs too much iron, leading to potentially fatal complications by damaging tissue and organs. Amazingly, the iron deposits can cause cirrhosis of the liver without any alcohol abuse. The doctors bandied about life expectancies, a 60 percent chance to live five years and 30 percent to live ten. The treatment was laughably primitive, a series of phlebotomies.

"Bloodletting! We might as well go back to Nepal and live among the leeches," John quipped with tremendous relief. In order for new blood to replace the old, he would give a unit of blood at least twice a month. Finally we understood why he had turned such a peculiar shade of greenish bronze in Nepal. Iron stores in his heart, liver, and other organs had effected his pigmentation.

Later studies of hemochromatosis would attribute John's bizarre behavior to iron overload. Disorientation, mood swings, and other personality changes, such as severe depression and anger, are now considered symptoms of what they used to call "bronze diabetes." While the drugs exacerbated the dementia, his mood swings convinced me something else was to blame, although I fought my intuition with self-deprecating admonishments about my codependency. Ashamed that I had stood by him, I considered it was a measure of my low self-esteem. When the research recently confirmed my instincts, I forgave myself for saving his life. I knew if I left him in Asia or Europe, he would surely die. I have come through the eye of a terrible codependent paradox, and the experience has left me with little patience for people who give black and white advice.

"Why didn't you just leave him in the Kathmandu hospital?" my Al-Anon sponsor asked condescendingly when she heard the story.

"It didn't feel right."

"You are addicted to him. You can't live without him."

Remembering that Al-Anon sponsors are not supposed to give advice, I challenged her. "Look, the doctors have just diagnosed my husband with a terminal illness. We've got two children who love him deeply. I can't just throw him out. I may be in total denial, as you say, but I have to answer to myself. I can't take your advice on blind faith."

"Nancy, I cannot support you if you stay with him."

"Okay," I thought for a moment. "Then you know what? I'm firing you. I may not be very far into my recovery, but I have to take Al-Anon literally. Your insistence that I leave him goes against the program's traditions, and I cannot accept that." I hung up the phone and felt terribly alone, yet confident that I had done the right thing. This was my introduction to the syndrome of Al-Anon Abuse. Through the years, I earned a black belt fighting it.

John was weak and exhausted from the hemochromatosis. My strength was waning; caring for an invalid is a twin dilemma to anxiety over the alcoholic. Although we were no longer facing liver cancer and the prospect of imminent death, we still moved through grief, shock, and anger, to a point of bargaining with this new disease. Then depression descended. The ceilings got lower and lights grew dimmer as we adjusted to the unfamiliar presence of death in five to ten.

It wasn't just the prediction about his life expectancy. Hemochromatosis causes testicular atrophication. One day, when I saw how much his genitals had shrunk, I waited till I was alone in the house and screamed into a pillow in terror. Like the night Johnny ate his glasses and the huge spider appeared in Kathmandu, I felt like Job. Would we ever escape the genetic curses descending upon us? If it effected me that strongly, imagine how that devastated John's sense of manhood.

My ex-husband agreed to let the children live with him and his new wife, Jo. It broke my heart to see them go, but I hoped Michael and Megan would deepen their relationship with their father. Unfortunately, they had a rough time at Paul's. He was doing his usual emotional starvation routine with his wife. After his third marriage, he confided, "You know how I am. I'm great till I get married and then I withdraw."

Jo was already miserable. Just as with me, he spent all day and night at the car lot. She took her five-year-old daughter out for dinner most evenings, leaving Megan and Michael to fend for themselves, Cinderella-style. When they repeatedly complained that they were alone in the house with nothing to eat, we moved them back home. Forgetting that kids need food and attention, self-centered Paul felt abandoned. They changed their last names to Steinbeck later that year. They considered John to be their real father because he nurtured and loved them.

Johnny and I clung to each other in desperation, expressing our fears and sadness. Why is our life filled with swells of pain and the undertow of sorrow? If I lay next to him or go everywhere with him, I can keep death away. If he dies, I'll be so bored. If he dies, I'll have lots of friends but no one so brilliant. I'll just muck around pretending I'm living. I'll do everything they tell you to do to carry on but it will be so bleak. I'll just be waiting for my own death.

Weeks of tenderness would pass. Then John would go on a binge and turn monstrous. One night he reached in his pocket and pulled out a stiletto-thin Italian fruit knife we had bought in Rome. He pointed it at me and chuckled sadistically. I called the police and they charged him with felony menacing.

Boulder police are experts in domestic violence. If I didn't press charges, they would. When John drunkenly attacked me before we left for Nepal, a friend insisted my doctor record the assault, which involved a perfect set of teeth marks on my shoulder. Because of that evidence, John was put on probation. If he ever physically abused me again, the judge said he would send him to the federal penitentiary. That ended the violence between us.

We needed more support. Al-Anon friends recommended that I see a woman therapist, Tanya Zucker, at the county-funded Alcohol Recovery Center. John started seeing her partner, Don Roth, gifted in working with vets. Sometimes the four of us would meet together. Privately, Don and Tanya told me my recovery was extremely threatening to John. Because he could no longer control me, I was disturbing the family's unhealthy equilibrium. In Al-Anon terms, King Baby was feeling abandoned because I wouldn't be his caretaker anymore. He had been accusing me of trying to capture his elusive free spirit, and now my independence was frightening him.

Using the Al-Anon slogan Don't accept unacceptable behavior, Don and Tanya taught me to define abuse. While John was often infuriated that they were privy to the bizarre aspects of our relationship, I began to feel safe. His cover was blown, but I finally had a place to talk about my despair. The process exposed his monstrous excesses and screaming rages; things I'd kept secret from even my closest friends. At last, someone else knew of his drunken, late-night propensity to smash all the eggs on the refrigerator door, leaving them dripping until morning. Someone else knew he fired his gun into the rafters while I slept beside him. The fact that everything got reported to our therapists made him think twice. John could no longer criticize my Al-Anon meetings, massages, writing, cooking, not cooking, or spending time with the door closed.

"How can I work on people pleasing if you are constantly demanding I submit to your whims?" I asked. "From now on, I am focusing on my needs. You can take care of yours."

I wanted him to stop driving me crazy. Seeking instant gratification, I wasn't always rational. I often lacked the patience to practice communication skills. After the fear of death sobered John, he desperately wanted to change the qualities in him that created illness and insanity. The frozen feelings from our repressed childhoods were thawing. We made a pact to support the process.

Later that summer, they asked John to put on a fireworks display at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center for the yearly encampment, a gathering of Rinpoche's guards. People wore military uniforms and slept in tents, played mock war games. There was marching and whimsical calisthenics such as lying on your back and doing push-ups to the sky.

We arrived with a trunk full of fireworks at dusk. They ushered us to the front of the crowd Rinpoche was addressing. We had not seen him for almost a year. What we saw shocked us both. He was so drunk, two guards had to hold him up. His speech was unintelligible. This man will drink himself to death and the community will be torn asunder. Three years later, that's exactly what happened. When I went back to college for my degree in chemical dependency, I learned Rinpoche had passed over into chronic late- stage alcoholism during our year abroad. Soon after, he developed Korsakoff's syndrome, commonly known as "wet brain," and two years later he died of esophageal varicies.

The shock of his deterioration hit me hard that night. As John set off the fireworks, I sat alone on a hillside, watching the members interact. Coming from the warm, close-knit communal culture of Nepal, I saw white upper-middle-class adults behaving as if they were at a cocktail party. Little clusters would mingle and part, touching superficially, satiated bees on drained flowers. I can't do this anymore. There's no spark, no depth of communion, just emotional distance. Are John and I the only ones who see through this charade? Isn't anyone else concerned about Rinpoche's drinking?

We lingered till midnight, chatting in uneasy shallowness. I felt as if the skin were being peeled off my body. The shock of Rinpoche's deterioration had sent my grief process cascading. Raw and shaken, I was silent as we drove back to our hotel. Falling into a bewildered sleep, I awoke despondent and poured out my feelings to John. As he validated my horror, he lessened my feelings of alienation. When I studied the disease model, I realized I had seen five hundred people in denial about the drunken elephant in the living room. The brightness in their eyes, the glint of Don't you dare mention it, the brave attempt to carry on despite the guru's intoxication were poison to me. Like babies playing in a toxic waste dump, the community was oblivious to the time bomb's tick.

Back in Boulder, at my Al-Anon meeting, I developed a friendship with a fellow Buddhist. We dared to call Rinpoche "the A-word," like two naughty children who had been cast out from their garden of illusion. Slowly, we began to draw others into our fragile web through mutual education about the disease that was destroying our families, our church, and our spiritual leader. We learned how to give people the litmus test of nurturing. If you feel energized after an interaction, that is the sign of a healthy person. If you feel drained, run for your life, because that's the disease and it will kill you.

More Buddhist women started attending meetings. As we shared our insights, wisdom and strength began to dawn. Within the bonds of sisterhood, and as the men joined soon after, in fellowship, we formed a lifeline by sharing experience, strength, and hope from the perspective of our confused and denial-ridden spiritual community.

An article had appeared that summer in our Buddhist newspaper, the Shambhala Sun, about Dhyani Ywahoo, a female of Cherokee lineage who combined Native American teachings with Buddhism. Sensing an instant familiarity, I wrote her a letter about the need for female teachers to balance the steady stream of visiting male lamas. When she came to Boulder to address her Peacekeeper organization, I invited her to meet with our community, hoping to strengthen the link between the two traditions.

Dhyani's then-husband, Golden True, called a few days later and said she would be willing to give a short talk. I could tell from his deep voice, Texas accent, and kick-ass way of speaking that he and John would sniff each other out and find comfort in each other's maleness. "You know how to do that," John told me. "It's like walking behind a horse's rump. You make the clicking noise that tells a man he can relax."

We fell in love with Dhyani's beauty. As a Vietnam vet, Golden had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder written all over him, so he and John clicked. Instantly, we became family. Their rowdy two-year-old adored Michael. Feeling a spark of recognition, like coming home, we swapped many war stories about our lives.

I discovered Golden had witnessed one of those incredible magic moments in my life. It happened the year we moved to Boulder. Paul was selling shoes at Kinney's. The kids and I had gone to the mall with our dear Tibetan lama friend, Karma Thinley Rinpoche, to pick Paul up from work. We found the salesmen struggling with the huge door that slides to lock up the store. It simply would not budge. Afraid Paul would have to guard the store all night, I looked helplessly at Karma Thinley. He made a pass with his hand and muttered a mantra under his breath. "Now try," he said. The door slid shut like butter.

Golden passed by the store just as that happened. He saw the family with two small children squirreling around the shoe displays and the red-robed monk murmuring incantations at the door. "It blew my mind! I wondered who the heck y'all were." When we went out for dinner that night, Paul took me for a spin on the dance floor. When I returned to the table, Karma Thinley announced very enthusiastically, "Oh, you have besty body for dancing!" When I told Johnny that story, he nicknamed me "Best-y Body." He called me that a lot; it cracked him up.

The recovering members of the community attended Dhyani's talk. The next morning, over breakfast, she probed the issues of Rinpoche's health and the community's morale. John and I told her everything. Our loyalty was to the truth of the situation, not protecting the Emperor's New Clothes.

"Rinpoche has drunk so much that he has holes in his brain," she explained. "That is how the Native Americans describe the effects of alcohol destroying brain cells. He needs physical attention. You must gather people together and see if something can be done. It would be good if he would take a sweat with Wallace Black Elk, who knows how to cure those holes. Go to the nuns in your community. They are the most pure and they are concerned. Also, seek out the elders, who can see more in their maturity and wisdom."

"I don't want to be the target of criticism," I protested.

"In the entire community, you are the one who knows most about these things. You have no choice. Otherwise, he will die."

I called for a meeting with the nuns and elders. We asked Roger La Borde, a member of Wallace Black Elk's adopted family, to address the situation from his intuitive point of view. Roger was aware of the confusion and pain caused by Rinpoche's behavior. Although there was still clarity in Rinpoche's consciousness, Roger said damage to his brain cells had left him disoriented.

"Rinpoche cannot decide if he wants to stay alive. Those with clarity of heart and mind must learn to stand on their own two feet. If the conditions continue, Rinpoche will die. Your community is suffering from the same masculine imbalance as the rest of the planet, along with the suppression of the feminine. The women must unite in truth. You will not accomplish any healing by challenging the male-dominated hierarchy. You must all assume responsibility for having relinquished your hearts, your power, and your intuition." Roger went on to say that the Buddhist teachings could not flourish in a form that suppressed honesty. He accurately predicted that tension would be created by increased jockeying for influential positions in the hierarchy.

Roger had confirmed our deepest intuitions. We called another meeting for all the recovering women. Twenty of us gathered at our house in confidentiality. This was the first time students could ask questions without fear of rejection and scorn. Apart from Rinpoche's physical health, another concern was the fact that he was in the process of marrying six other women. They were to assume positions above the board of directors. While the party line claimed this was Rinpoche's way of empowering the feminine, we believed it was his way of getting his sex poodles to jump through their hoops. We viewed them as opportunistic airheads, simultaneously smug and confused about exactly what it was that made them so special. The weddings were secret; only inner sanctum-ites knew of them. The women were subjected to a rigorous examination about the Buddhist teachings. Rinpoche drunkenly nodded in and out of the ceremonies, and his wife never objected. If this were empowering the feminine, we'd eat our meditation cushions.

We discussed the arrogance and closed mindedness of the community, the blatant chauvinism that proclaimed ours is the only way. We met their doubts and concerns with kindness instead of censure. Emerging from denial about our own erratic behavior or a loved one's, it was time to acknowledge that we had more clarity than the flock of untreated codependents. Feeling tremendous sadness about the confusion, we also felt freedom as we moved from the role of victim to warrior, searching for clarity and truth.

I had rented a carriage house near the mountains to escape from John's illness and write. We gathered there every Tuesday at noon under the guise of a Women's Buddhist Al-Anon meeting. Wives of the community's most powerful men timidly discussed their domestic problems. When they started practicing the principles of Al-Anon, change invariably followed, and we celebrated each other's growth. As we revealed family secrets, from the microcosm of our homes to the cocaine debauchery at Rinpoche's court, we grew in mutual strength and support. This infuriated the hierarchy, who objected with derision and scorn. They said we were missing the point, that the crazy wisdom lineage gave Rinpoche license to do whatever was needed in the name of "teaching." As a result, we lost superficial friendships but gained a depth of intimacy we had never known. A large extended family formed, not to replicate the harmonics of our abusive childhoods, but one that was loving and full of joy. We learned how to play, to celebrate our success, share pain, become supportable, and speak from our hearts. These skills would save our lives, but not the life of our teacher.

36. Last Ditch

NANCY

In the dead of winter, braving blizzards and black ice, I shuttled the children back and forth to Denver for their second round of family week, where the patient's family is educated about the disease. I resented the inconvenience of being left to care for children and pets while once again John played at rehab. During this round we began to understand exactly how dangerous we were for each other. When they sensed the rage I was feeling about John's inability to stay sober, the counselors talked to us about separating. If we wanted to heal, we could not continue to live in such agony. When the rage subsided, heartbroken and terrified, we clung to each other and prayed, but the red flags of doom were flying everywhere.

When John soon relapsed after his second round of thirty-day treatment, we began our descent into the tragic destruction of our marriage. I marvel at commitment that eventually finds resolution in resurrection and healing. It felt at the time like I was being burned alive, but that was an illusion. We were really on the verge of witnessing a miracle.

My therapist urged me to seek codependent treatment at Sharon Wegsheider-Cruz's facility in South Dakota. That ten-day program solidified my determination to beat the odds. When I returned home, we decided to fulfill Megan's dream of attending boarding school. We chose Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona, for its curriculum in the arts. Michael and I flew down to register her and I fell in love with the breathtaking red-rock formations and the silent desert.

They say that Sedona intensifies whatever you bring to it. If you want to heal, Sedona will etch that possibility in its red rocks. If you want to abuse yourself the land will provide carte blanche room for indulgence. Sensing Boulder had become a dead end for our growth, I didn't want to leave that enchanted land. Early one morning, sitting by the pinon fire in my hotel room, I called John.

"The scenery is spectacular. I want you to see it. Let's move here for a few months and then decide what we want to do."

The idea intrigued John. "You think we're ready to leave the stranglehold of the Buddhist community? I could use a change. Besides, every cop in town knows my name. I can't walk down the street without one of them calling 'Hi, John!' over their loudspeaker."

He had been DUI'd twice more that winter. Desperately in need of a rest, I sighed. "I don't want to leave you, but I'm tired. There's no fight left in me. If you can't stay sober, I've got to figure out a way to live without you." It was my last-ditch effort at getting us out of the ditch.

When Michael and I returned home, there was another medical crisis to face. True to the Pain Center's diagnosis, John had developed excruciating gallstones, which demanded more drugs to kill the pain. The doctors were considering yet another operation. In February of 1987, they removed his gall bladder, which brought on another bout of Percodan addiction. We drove to Sedona ten days later with just enough luggage packed in our car to stay in a furnished condo. I begged John to throw away his stash before we left town, never really knowing how badly he was hooked. He complied and we drove off with John in heavy withdrawal and me in heavy denial, both hoping for the best.

We spent our wedding anniversary in a condo in Moab, Utah, where we stayed for several days. Discovering an alternate reality we never thought possible, we felt at peace there. The windows looked out on the simple streets where life felt so deliciously ordinary. We explored the land through bright blue-skied days, hypnotized by the fantastic red-rock formations and the willowy green trees. Fixing dinner at night, I would pretend that we lived there, that we had lost our shadow side, our diseases, any vestiges that set us apart from the unpretentious, wholesome life outside. Maybe we were schoolteachers, easily blending with the small-town simplicity. No one was famous, nor related to fame, nor going to be famous. Then we could have a life, instead of a myth, an opera, a Greek tragedy. If we could just quit being larger than life. Sick and tired of our terminal uniqueness, I prayed for humility.

The notion of an unencumbered life charmed Johnny, but an impetus was driving us like a hurricane. Although we didn't want to admit it, it was determined to drive us apart. I remember how the poplar trees waved outside the window when we had a clear view of the life we wanted. Perhaps we could cultivate the ability to experience a graceful flow instead of torturous rapids and labyrinthine roller coasters. As I daydreamed, watching the leaves shimmer in dappled sunlight, I had no idea Johnny's drowsiness was coming from a massive and dangerous withdrawal from Percodan. I thought he was just tired from his gall-bladder operation.

We settled into an easy rhythm in Sedona. Since Michael had stayed in Boulder with Paul to finish the semester, with Megan in boarding school down the street, we were without children. This was an important time for us, a chance to spend uninterrupted hours together for the first time in the eight years since we'd met. Our days consisted of long drives up to Flagstaff and on to the Grand Canyon, picnic lunches, lying in the sun, swimming at the condo, and working out at a marvelous spa down the street.

John was still weak from the operation. Since it was a fresh start, and he didn't know any doctors, he tried to get by without pain pills. He suffered from adhesions from the gall- bladder operation, and was often in agony. When the pain lessened, he swam dozens of laps every day, trying valiantly to create a health-oriented life.

I felt like a newborn baby, cut loose from all habitual patterns, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, instead of what I should be doing. Again, as in Kathmandu, I was freed from domesticity. We were in a comfortable condo, not a large house with lawns and gardens. I wanted desperately to do something creative, but I was too numb to come up with anything. The best times were late at night when we nestled in the hot tub and drank in the stars.

Two months later, Rinpoche finally died of acute late stage alcoholism. I saw a picture of him taken a few days before his death. He was bone-thin; his eyes had the haunted look of a madman. "I will never have another teacher in this lifetime," I swore to the silent red rocks at sunset. The ravens circled the valley, and I felt as though I had wasted every ounce of my practice and training with this maniacal Tibetan.

Anger erupted in both of us toward Rinpoche's henchmen, whom we felt had killed him. In their Emperor's-New-Clothes mentality, his guards had refused to face the reality of Rinpoche's addictions. It wasn't just alcohol. The truth leaked out about his $40,000-a- year coke habit and, the ultimate irony, an addiction to Seconal. Sleeping pills for the guru who advertised himself as a wake-up call to enlightenment. John and I felt duped, cheated, and outraged, especially toward the yes-men, who remained unaccountable for the deception inflicted upon our community. Rinpoche's enablers claimed that supplying him with drugs and alcohol was a measure of their devotion, while sneering at those of us who objected. In their sick denial, they couldn't see he was suiciding right before our eyes. John and I had fantasies about kidnapping Rinpoche and detoxing him ourselves, imagining what thirty days of sobriety would have done to his warped perceptions. In his last year, he'd become so deluded, he would summon his attendants and tell them he wanted to visit the Queen of Bhutan. They would put him in his Mercedes and drive around the block several times. As they led him back to the house, they laughingly asked how his visit went.

"Wonderful," he'd reply. "She was delightful."

And they called that magic. "He's so powerful," they'd whisper. It was pathetic.

Before Rinpoche's death, at a large community meeting, John asked the attendants why they hadn't refused to give him any more alcohol. They pompously claimed it was a mark of their devotion to give the guru what he asked for. "Whatever the teacher demands, all that I will give," was their vow. They believed that to break that vow, to refuse to administer the poison that was killing him, would literally send them to hell.

Johnny's question made everyone nervous. "Why do I have the feeling that we're pouring booze down his throat out of our own desire for comfort, which stems from greed? The guru's goose is being cooked, and we're all sitting by the oven, warming our hands, waiting for the feast." We shared common dreams about being ostracized by the community. If they knew how John and I were redefining our spirituality, they would have stoned us on the spot. Those nightmares were a reflection of the impending shunning, filled with hideous torture, staged in the sewers and cesspools of our incestuous community. Feeling uneasy about the vows we'd taken with Rinpoche, we didn't want our state of mind to be a reflection of his insanity. Dhyani suggested a releasing ceremony to give back his bad medicine. When John and I flew back to Boulder after Rinpoche's death, twelve of us gathered in a circle and proclaimed, "Rinpoche, we release any attachment to your behavior. We release our aversion to your self-destruction, for within that aversion is the seed of attraction. By returning your intoxication and arrogance, we affirm our relationship to enlightened mind and the development of compassion." A symbolic cup of sake was passed around but not imbibed. John then threw it out the window with a vow. "I will never again use Rinpoche's behavior to justify my own addictions."

Comments from other lamas about Rinpoche began to seep in. They finally admitted that for years they had feared for his sanity and thought he had been acting irresponsibly, but no one had spoken out. This news confirmed our discomfort, yet we still had no idea how much abuse was in store for the community in the coming years. As the true nature of corruption revealed itself, we were grateful that we'd participated in the ritual that severed us from the madness.

We attended Rinpoche's cremation ceremony in May of 1987 with Dhyani and her husband. I was glad to be there with them, safe in the VIP tent, away from the crowd of three thousand people in heavy denial. Sitting with visiting dignitaries from other religious traditions, John and I felt too raw to face the onslaught of frozen feelings. True to the community's stoic form, no emotions were shown. We might as well have been at a cocktail party. After the body was cremated, rainbows and traditional Tibetan symbols appeared as cloud formations in the sky, confirming Rinpoche's magical gifts. Why had he not used that magic on himself instead of drinking with such a vengeance? It is said that the guru manifests the most neurotic aspects of his students, so there was always the glib attitude that Rinpoche's addiction was a reflection of our proclivities. Did that mean it had to kill him? We were told he could vanquish any evil in the world. Did he just not want to fight anymore?

"He got caught in his own wringer," John said ironically.

The party line claimed Rinpoche's outrageous behavior was a powerful vehicle for awakening his students. If you viewed it as drunken unmanageabiiity, they said you were missing the point, throwing away a precious opportunity for spiritual growth. The people with the greatest awareness about addictions were shunned as being the most impossible to enlighten. We were told that we simply were not "man enough" to take the industrial strength of Rinpoche's selfless teachings. In the May 2000 issue of the Shambhala Sun, the organization's mouthpiece, Rinpoche's son stated: "My dad ... was a drinking madman! How much of a madman are you? How brave are you to really do things? He was a warrior. A warrior with the pen. A warrior with the word. A warrior with the drinking. If you don't like his drinking, he was a fool, he's dead. If you don't mind the drinking thing and think he may have had incredible enlightened wisdom, then you are an eligible candidate for his teachings."

After his death, a Buddhist teenager asked me, "Did you know that some guys used to pimp for Rinpoche? They'd find him new women to sleep with." She was talking about the sharks that sought out eager new females, either at Rinpoche's request, or on their own recognizance, hoping to win favor with him. We discussed the obvious oxymoron to which everyone turned a blind eye, that an impeccable warrior's path cannot incorporate a voracious and sloppy appetite for drugs, alcohol, and hundreds of sexual encounters. While everyone was busy honoring Rinpoche's courage for being so blatant about his massive indulgences, his henchmen constantly skimmed the various centers for new blood. Women were trained as "consorts." That meant they knew what to do when he threw up, shit in the bed, snorted coke till dawn, turned his attention to other women, and maybe even got in the mood for a threesome.

Our little band of recovering Buddhists began to ask people if they thought this flagrant behavior constituted religious or sexual abuse. The standard answer you get from the male good old boys who buy into the system because it means their coffers will also be full to feed their own addictions, is that they never, in all their pimping, heard any woman complain about sleeping with Rinpoche. (I use that term loosely, because for years he was alcoholically impotent and would devise little sexual games such as using a dildo known as "Mr. Happy" or insisting women masturbate in front of him.)

You don't ask people in denial for reality checks. You ask those who have crawled though the trenches into the light, those who have dealt head-on with their own abuse issues. They are the ones who will proclaim the truth fearlessly in the face of mocking ostracism and threats of eternal damnation. Many women, who felt they were no more than chattel, silently left the scene. Sleeping with Rinpoche was like sleeping with a rock star. You got elevated for about an hour until he moved on to the next new face. There were always eager young initiates who mistakenly thought it was a way of gaining status in the community. Because of the spiritual trappings, women forgot that groupies are always relegated to the sloppy seconds category after they've been had. Like a bunch of high school jocks, the male-dominated administration smirked behind the backs of Rinpoche's conquests. A woman with low self-esteem and no education about abuse will acquiesce to such degradation out of ignorance.

Thankful to be removed from the scene, 1 found sanctuary in Sedona. Ironically, I realized I was getting all the help I needed to make the break from the battlefield. In Boulder, the typical recovering codependent attitude was if a guy won't quit drinking, you should kick him out and move on to a healthy relationship. Most of the Sedona Al-Anon women were grandmothers; they'd been married to their alcoholics for half a century. Accepting alcoholism as a disease, not an inconvenience, they mastered the art of detaching with love and humor. These grandmothers knew that you cannot take a disease personally. It's not out to get YOU, it's only out to get its host. They practiced the Al-Anon slogan -- Love the person, hate the disease -- with a sense of compassion that I wanted to emulate. Eager to transmit their wisdom, they shared their experience, strength, and hope with me.

These women loved their husbands. Whether for economic reasons or out of family loyalty, they did not see them as disposable. If, at times, their situation appeared hopeless, they closed ranks and nurtured each other. I marveled at their lack of vindictiveness, which often ate away at me. When they saw that my marriage was losing its lifeblood, their implanted vision of freedom from fear and anger carried me through the chaos. It has years of practice, but it was there that I learned to be gentle about dealing with addictions, because harshness just turns around and bites you back. My Al-Anon sages managed to impart the profound notion of powerlessness to me. I am grateful that they entered my life at a time when I desperately needed their wisdom and nurturing.

With the grandmothers' help, I faced a phone call from Thom that caused the bottom to drop out of our marriage. He had broken up with Joanna and was staying with friends on a farm in upstate New York. Footloose and free to party, he wanted Johnny to join him. We all knew half of John was suffocating, thirsting for a drink. In his perverse, Cain-slaying- Abel mode, Thom wanted to rescue him from the other half that was desperately trying to heal.

I was terrified that I would lose John. I knew if he continued to drink, he would die, and die soon. He'd been cirrhotic for five years; if he went to New York, he would ignore his biweekly phlebotomies. Thom was oblivious to the fact that alcohol increases the iron deposits that were strangling John's liver and heart.

I wasn't being perverse when I told John to go. As much as I dreaded it, I was ready to be on my own. I could no longer walk point around his slow suicide. I let go and faced my worst nightmare as John, following his brother's fatal cue, began to drink himself to death with a vengeance.

undead wrote:Kundalini and Qigong Psychosis

By Dr. Tan Kheng Khoo



The seeker who dares to awaken the kundalini power without the grace and guidance of a guru might become insane, succumb to diseases, or even die. This is because he does not possess the necessary knowledge, steadiness of mind, or patience required for this difficult undertaking.

- Swami Kripalvananda