Collected Essays (77 page)

Oh yeah, and why Ike had a big dick. Well, he was a real scapegrace at West Point, always in trouble. Sometimes he even reported himself if nobody else would bother. Genial. So the officer says, “Come down to my room in dress-coats for a punishment-duty-tour.” It was Ike and his room-mate, supposed to report. And the prank is that they only wear the special dress-coats and not the (expected) rest of the uniform, no not anything else, “not another stitch.” So all I’m saying is, if Ike had the (dick and) balls to do the prank he must have been pretty well-adjusted or had a humongo dong…one!

Note on “Access to Tools”

Written in 1983.

Appeared in
Transreal!

I wrote “Access to Tools” one humid, gray-sky morning in Lynchburg, Virginia, chuckling all the while. The name “Access to Tools” is lifted from the
Whole Earth Catalog
. I had the very unrealistic notion that this would be the first column in a continuing series for the
The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
I wasn’t actually high when I wrote it, although I think I did have a hangover. I was deliberately putting on a certain zonked style that I thought was funny—and a blow against conventional notions of good taste.

As I mentioned in the note to the previous essay, George Zebrowski was editing the
Bulletin
at the time, and he’d asked me to to start a column, and this was the result. George didn’t feel he should run it. As he said in his letter to me about it, “Gadzooks!”

The same instinct that prompted me to try and start a writing-advice column led me also to start doing TV reviews of books. After a lady named Nancy Heilman Davis interviewed me on the Lynchburg public access cable channel, I started doing a monthly TV book-review called
Brain Food
. Among the books that I reviewed were local poet Cornelius Eady’s
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze
, Charles Bukowski’s
Tales of Ordinary Madness
, William Burroughs’s
Letters to Allen Ginsberg from Tangiers
, Charles Baudelaire’s
Fatal Destinies: Edgar Allan Poe
, and Anselm Hollo’s
Sojourner Microcosms
.

My children made fun of the way I would nervously raise my eyebrows while I was talking on TV, so one time I tried wearing shades. That didn’t work so well, so the next time I brought my daughter Isabel and our dog Arf, which helped keep me relaxed. You could see them onscreen.

The Central Teachings of Mysticism

This is not going to be very funny, but I hope it’s at least interesting. One reason I like to talk about mysticism is that talking weird gets me high: the air gets like thick yellow jelly, you know, and everyone’s part of the jelly-vibe jelly-space jelly-time…

All is One
. That’s the main teaching, that’s the so-called secret of life. It’s no secret, though. It’s a truism that we’ve all heard dozens of times. The secret teachings are shouted in the streets.
All is One
, what can I do with that? How can I use it in the home? If
that’s
the answer, what’s the question?

I guess the most basic problem we all have to deal with is death. In Zen monasteries, the entering students are given
koans
to solve. A
koan
is a type of problem unsolvable to the rational mind:
What was your face before you were born? This is not a stick. [Holds up a stick.] What shall I call it?
Each of us on Earth has a special koan to work on, it’s the death-koan, handed out at birth: “
Hi, this is the world, you’re alive now and it’s nice. After awhile you die and it all stops. What are you going to do about it?
”

The mystic escapes death by denying that he or she exists as an individual bag of meat. “I am God,” is the easiest way to put it, though this doesn’t always go over too well. “Hi, I’m God, this is my wife, she’s God, too. These are the children, God, God, and…” What I have in mind here is that God—or the One, if you want to be more neutral-sounding—what I mean is that God is everywhere and we are all part of God. We are like eyes that God grows to look at each other with.

The word “God” does grate. Organized religion puts a lot of people uptight (we will be passing out the plates soon) and when a lot of us hear that word (get your hands outta there, friend) our first impulse is to find a brick and throw it, or just leave or go to sleep (you’re gonna burn for this)…

Here’s where the second central teaching comes in. All is One, fine. But:
The One is Unknowable
. “God”—that’s just a noise I’m making up here, a kind of pig-squeal. We don’t know God’s name, and we never will. The ultimate thing, the fundamental Reality—it’s not something the rational mind can tie up in a net of words. I can’t really tell you what I’m thinking about. In a way it’s pointless to talk about mysticism at all. “If you see God, only piss to mark the spot”—that’s a line from a poem I wrote when I was thirty. I was down in the islands, standing on a beach at night.
If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him
.

So here’s two teachings:
All is One
, and
The One is Unknowable
. The third (and last) teaching is
The One is Right Here
. You’re totally enlightened right now, right as you are. You see God all the time; you can’t stop seeing Him. We’re all in heaven and there is no hell.

First I claim that all of reality is one single thing, a sort of giant orgasm or something. Then I say that this One is unknowable, but right away I turn around and say that the One is perfectly easy to see, it’s everywhere. Do we have a contradiction? How can the mystics say that, on the one hand, God is unknowable, and that, on the other hand, God is everywhere?

People who have a more or less fascist view of religion are perfectly comfortable with the idea of God as something way up there, something unattainable: the Commander in Chief, the Head Technician, our Fearless Leader, the Great Scientist who put all this together. The Church of Christ, Cosmic Programmer. What’s God thinking about? Smart stuff, hard stuff, stuff we can never understand. That’s the
God is Unknowable
teaching. No rational human description can exhaust the riches of the One.

The other side of the coin is that we know the One perfectly well. You can’t describe God in any complete way, but God’s as much a part of you as your body is. You can know something in an immediate way without knowing it in any kind of analytic way. You don’t need to be a geneticist to know how to make babies.

So when mysticism says
The One is Unknowable
and then says
The One is Right Here
, there isn’t really a contradiction. It’s just that there’s two
kinds
of knowing. We can’t know the One rationally, but we can know it in an immediate and mystical way. Anyone can go into the temple, but you have to leave your shoes outside. “Temple” stands for a mystical vision of God, and “shoes” stands for conventional ways of talking. You take off your shoes and walk into the temple.

We don’t have to go to the Far East to find mystical religion. Christianity is based on the idea that, on the one hand, God is way up there in seventh heaven, and that, on the other hand, Jesus comes down to live in our hearts. It’s a strange thing that many of us are more comfortable with Buddhism than we are with Christianity. It’s strange, but the reasons are pretty obvious—I mean, imagine if there were a 24-hour-a-day Buddhist Broadcasting TV network:

“Friends, I want to talk to you about
samadhi
. This blessed state of union with the Void—Void being Nothingness, friends—this blessed state was first experienced in a little town near the Ganges River. God brought a man—a
man
, friends, and not a woman—God in His wisdom brought forth this human—a
human
, friends, and not a Communist—God brought to this seeker a vision of the Void. How best might you, in your ignorance, in your sin, in your present debased circumstances, how might you best seek the Void? The Void can be found in your wallet, dear seeker, if only you will send its contents to me…”

So you go turn on the radio, man, and instead of music there’s some grainy-voiced guy yelling:

“…hatred. Yes,
hatred
, my fellow enlightened ones, Buddha came to preach hatred. I know this may sound strange to some of you out there in the radio audience, but it’s
not
a matter of conjecture. God hates the unbeliever, just as the unbeliever hates
me
…”

There is so much negative stuff associated with religion, that many of us would just as soon never talk about God at all. But there’s still that death-
koan
hanging overhead: l
ife is beautiful, life ends, what can I do?
If I decide not to think about bad stuff like death and loneliness, then I end up spending all my energy on not thinking. I can buy lots of stuff, but every visit to the repair shop is an intimation of mortality. I can get real high, but I always have to come down. And not choosing anything at all is itself a choice.

Mysticism offers a way out. It’s really just a simple change of perspective. A person’s life is like a design in an endless spacetime tapestry. Molecules weave in and out of your body all the time. Inhale/Exhale; Eat ‘n’ Excrete. You breathe an atom out, I breathe it in. I say this, you answer that. Atoms, thoughts and energies play back and forth among us. We are linked spacetime patterns, overlapping waves in an endless sea. No one exists in isolation, everyone is part of the Whole. If a person can only take the word, “I,” to be the Whole, then that “I” is indeed immortal. In the book of Exodus, Moses asks God what His real name is. God answers: “I AM.” All is One,
All is One
.

If this were just an abstract idea, then mysticism would not be very important. What makes mysticism important is that you can directly experience the fact that All is One.

I used to read about mysticism and wonder how to score for some enlightenment. There’s something so slippery about the central teachings—the way the One is supposed to be unspeakable, yet everywhere all the time—it used to really tantalize me. And then finally I started getting glimpses of it, sometimes with chemicals, sometimes for no reason at all. I’d see God, or feel the world synch into full unity, and I’d love it, but whenever I tried to grab onto it, the life would somehow drain out, and I’d just have some dry abstract principle.

After I got so I could occasionally feel that All is One, I started being uptight that I couldn’t be there all the time. I bought lots of books by totally enlightened men. Eventually I concluded that no one does stay up there all the time. You can’t always be having a shining vision that All is One; you have to do other stuff, like deal with your boss, or fix the car, meaningless social hang-ups, the stuff like walking and eating and breathing. You can’t always be staring at the White Light.

But you can. That’s the next level, you see. The Light is everywhere, all the time. Being unenlightened is itself a kind of enlightenment. There are no teachings, and there’s nothing to learn.

Congratulations, Mary.

Note on “The Central Teachings of Mysticism”

Written in 1982.

Appeared in
Transreal!
, WCS Books, 1991.

We were living in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1982, and a poet friend of ours named Mary Molyneux Abrams had been taking classes at Sweetbriar College so she could get her Bachelor’s degree. She and her husband David Abrams were friends of ours there. David is a photographer. I used Mary as a model for Sondra Tupperware in
Master of Space and Time
, and David took the photo of me which appeared on the dustjacket of
The Secret of Life
.

 In the fall of 1982, Mary decided to stop going to school, and her husband said, “Why not give Mary a graduation party anyway?” He made up engraved invitations mentioning me as the commencement speaker. At the party, I handed out mimeographed copies of “The Central Teachings of Mysticism” and read it to the audience of some forty people.

 My father Embry Rucker, Sr., who was an Episcopal priest, happened to be there and he gave a blessing. And at the end of the ceremony we sang “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”

Looking back at this little lecture, I enjoy its flow, but I feel like it’s missing something. God isn’t just some kind of logic puzzle, God can directly touch your heart. Over the years I’ve added a fourth and a fifth “teaching.” God is Love, and God will help you if you ask. Help you do what? To be less selfish, more loving, less driven, and more serene—to let go and stop trying to run everything.

Memories of Arf

In September of 1981 we were living in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia and I were in our thirties; Georgia was 12, Rudy was 9, Isabel was 6. We decided we wanted a family dog, partly as a present for Isabel’s 7
^th
birthday.

We looked in the classified ads and found an ad:
Free Puppies
. I called and got directions and the place was in the boonies north of Lynchburg. We had to drive on smaller and smaller roads to get there; it was a farm, with lots of bare red dirt. The farmer’s dog had done
it
with two different males and had given birth to a litter of six puppies on July 3, 1981, though later we always like to say that it had been the Fourth of July.

Five of the puppies were black and shorthaired, one was orange and white and had long hair. He liked to lie on his back when you petted him; the farm-wife liked him best, she said she always brought him inside to pet while she watched TV. We all practiced petting him, and he eagerly rolled over on his back to offer us his stomach. The farmer gave him to us. On the drive home we agreed to name our new puppy Arf, a.k.a. Arfie.

At first I thought we’d keep him in a box down in the basement, but he whined so pitifully that the children got him promoted to the kitchen. We all took turns walking him around the little neighborhood streets of Lynchburg. A lifelong characteristic of Arf’s soon became evident: he didn’t like to come when you called him. At all. Ever. Although, according to Georgia, if you squatted down very low and clapped he was likely to come a-runnin’.