The Defining Moment

The Defining Moment

At last we have come to a major turning point. It was Thanksgiving of my senior year, November of 1971. I drove up from San Diego to La Puente to visit my good friend Charlie Brocket and his family for Thanksgiving. I had been a son to the Brockett’s for several years. Charlie’s sister, Susie and I dated for a bit.

Charlie was there visiting from Tennessee with his new bride, Sharon.

It seems that at that point in time, there was an underground happening of new age psychology based around a thing called “Primal Therapy”. What I didn’t know was that Charlie and Sharon were fairly involved with this movement…and had decided to see if they could coax me into a primal therapy session.

Primal therapy (this is my limited, distorted view) is based on the theory that we have all suffered a number of traumas…but these traumas were experienced before we were mature enough to deal with them appropriately. (I know of people having traumas when they were only a few months old.)

So what we do is we wrap the trauma in what we feel is a “safe memory” and we bury the trauma as deep as we can. We are no longer able to connect with the trauma…we can only remember the “safe memory”.

Primal Therapy attempts to use any method possible to allow one to “unearth” these buried traumas…now that you are mature enough to deal with them. When they DO come up, they are just as painful as they were originally, but you are better prepared to deal with the pain. You may have heard the term “Primal Scream”…which refers to the pain when re-experienced.

So Charlie and Sharon conspired (without my knowledge or consent) to lure me into bringing up a Primal. And they succeeded.

Basically, it contained part of the essence of all Primal pain…the fact of how deeply I felt unloved and unlovable. The truth is, I don’t even remember the particulars. What I remember is coming to realize how damaged I was as a human being and how progress was actually possible.

I felt like I had a knapsack of rocks on my back and that Primal had tossed one of those rocks aside. It felt like such a huge difference. Finally I knew just how miserable I was and how empty my life was.

I was in touch with how very small I felt. Everyone else was a first class citizen…except for me. I was like a fourth class citizen. I didn’t really deserve to be alive. I was taking up air and space that “real” people could be using.

But most of all, I knew that very night, that I could never stop until all those rocks were gone. I knew that I could get better. I knew that growth was possible. I was going to get myself cured…no matter what it took.

What else was there? What else is important in this life? How could I possibly turn back now when I knew how really miserable I was? I couldn’t simply swallow back all that pain. I was in touch with the truth of myself and I never wanted to let it go.

The next day Charlie’s younger brother, Larry, gave me the most unusual book. You have to recognize that I was still incredibly high on life and truth. I was profoundly open and vulnerable. And Larry gives me this book, “Be Here Now” by Baba Ram Dass. And I spent six or seven hours that day reading that book. It was mind-boggling. Dozens and dozens of concepts I’d never considered or heard of before. And at the heart of all these foreign ideas and concepts was this one central goal… Enlightenment.

I could barely wrap my mind around what enlightenment was suppose to mean. I take that back. I could approach it…but I really couldn’t understand what it was supposed to mean. It was entirely magical. And, of course, it was an impossible mission for mere mortals like me. Particularly individuals who were as broken and emotionally crippled as I was.

The next night I found Larry sitting at a table by their pool and I bombarded him with questions and…I must have said something about the impossibility or something similar…and he just hushed me with a wave of his hand. I started in again and he just said, “Be Here Now”….and smiled. And I said, Larry, do you mean?” And he just smiled again and said, “Be Here Now”.

A few minutes later…it happened. Everything was exactly the same…and everything was completely different. Everything shone with an inner glow. And in the moment after that, all the worries of the world slid away. There was no striving, no struggle, no care, and no worry. It just WAS.

It was incredibly, profoundly moving and beautiful. It was beyond all life’s expectation.

Truth is, it did not seem “of” this world. It was of this world but apart.

It was “Alice through the Looking Glass”.

It was Enlightenment.

Roughly 24 hours after I first heard the word and barely understood the concept…I experienced The Enlightenment.

Students and seekers spend their entire lives searching for something that was handed to me so effortlessly. It only lasted an hour or so, but it seemed unforgettable….which of course it was.

You should take into account that the Primal I had experienced two days earlier…still had me in a place of incredible openness.

And now another defining moment in the space of 72 hours.

There was no way that I could argue with it. There was nothing on this planet worth working for, searching for, striving towards…but Enlightenment. Everything else was laughingly trivial.

For that moment….all I wanted was to have Enlightenment as my own…to be inside its wonder forever.

There was….nothing else.

Of course I knew that in order for me to find Enlightenment, I was also going to have to get rid of a few more “rocks” along the way. I was too screwed up to find Enlightenment in my current emotionally twisted state.

But make no mistake…from that very night…Enlightenment was all that really mattered to me. The entire fabric of my life had changed.

I had been through a war; nearly died in combat, won the Silver Star, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and presented the Key to the City by the mayor of San Diego after a parade in my honor.

I had graduated college with a degree in Political Theory, been Freshman Class President, Student Council member, Student News Director and held several offices in my fraternity, including Vice President.

I had visited Yokohama, Okinawa, Da Nang, Amsterdam, Essen, Strasburg, Paris, Brussels, Dover, London, Wales and Dublin. I’d sung in restaurants in Paris and Ireland. I’d spent countless hours in the Louvre studying and admiring the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory. And then I spent almost as many hours at the Museum of the Impressionists learning to appreciate Gauguin, Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh and my favorite, the irreverent Toulouse Lautrec…none of which you actually appreciate until you see them in person. I also enjoyed spending time at the home and studio of Rodin…the sculpture who created “The Thinker”, “The Kiss” and “The Secret”.

I also appreciated the beauty and serenity of Notre Dame and the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre.

Coincidentally, I’d also passed through Hawaii twice and was deeply moved by how quickly I was able to find some sort of peace within me when visiting those idyllic isles.

I had been through my first Primal and had experienced Enlightenment within 48 hours of being introduced to the concept. I had given up all pursuit of a normal life and had dedicated myself to a life on the spiritual path.

I was 24 years old.