At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  “Or maybe the natural forces don’t like all these humans here tapping into esoteric spiritual realms,” I suggested.

  “Y’know I never thought of—” Matt started to respond with a chuckle but was abruptly drowned out in a flailing, crackling tumble of large (and painful) hailstones. “To the shrine!” he shouted, and we leapt up and scampered up the steep slope from the cliff edge past the altar for butter lamps and into the large unoccupied white room with its scores of red cushions scattered around the floor.

  This was our first introduction to the Dzogchen’s magnificent meditation space with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the cliffs, the bays, and the timeless infinities of the ocean. In the midst of the frantic hammering of hail on the roof and the blizzard-like miasma outside, which eliminated views of anything at all, Matt asked with a huge grin, “So whadya think of this?!”

  “Amazing—it just came out of nowhere!” I gushed.

  Anne was silent.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  No reply.

  “Hello?”

  “What’s that phrase?” she finally responded. “If you don’t like the Irish weather…”

  “Just wait five minutes,” Matt said, rounding off the old chestnut. I remembered a similar and well-justified sentiment in the Hebrides of Scotland and also in Maine. And then, being English by birth, I couldn’t resist throwing in another favorite chestnut—one of good old Dr. Johnson’s: “When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is always of the weather.”

  “So how did you know I was English?” asked Matt.

  “Well, you certainly don’t sound Irish! Oh—and I’ve just remembered an old Yorkshire saying:

  ‘It ain’t no use to grumble and complain

  It’s just as cheap and easy to rejoice;

  When God sorts out the weather and sends in rain,

  Why then—rain’s my choice.’

  Ironically there was latent meaning in the words—a sense of benign, smiling receptivity—that seemed most appropriate for our Buddhist shrine room setting.

  ON OUR WAY OUT into the now-bright day with a cloudless sky again, I spotted this handwritten message on an index card pinned to a notice board by the door. It seemed coincidentally (but of course, as we all know by now, there are no coincidences) to capture the essence of the string of little experiences since our arrival here a couple of hours earlier:

  We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are often enslaved. And yet when you look deeply, you realize there is nothing that is permanent or constant, not even the tiniest hair on your body. Nothing is as it appears to be. Opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering. The sky is our absolute nature. It has no barriers and is boundless. And these great cliffs of Beara are a springboard for the spirit. So—Fly! Fly! Fly!

  7

  Monologue on Mortality

  “YEAH—THERE IS A DEFINITE SENSE of ‘flying’ here—on many levels. The Karma quotient must be off the scales. A real Richter-buster! For me at the moment, I guess it feels like a kind of floating between two worlds—the Buddhist world of recycling and reincarnation and the Christian world of heavenly hosts and all that kind of thing…I don’t really see any contradictions between them. I believe they’re both intensely personal, enveloping courage, love, and compassion as key ingredients to life and whatever comes after.”

  He was a middle-aged man, tall and thin—even slightly emaciated—and he walked slowly, with a distinct stoop. We never really introduced ourselves. I just found him sitting on the cliff edge at Dzogchen one late afternoon on my second spontaneous visit. He looked deep in thought—maybe even meditation—but then he turned, smiled a sort of wan smile, and invited me to join him. He was obviously troubled by something weighty. His brow was compressed in furrows and his eyes lacked any kind of life-sparkle. I soon found out why…

  “The cancers hit me suddenly. It was like what Joan Didion wrote in that recent book of hers, The Year of Magical Thinking: ‘Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’

  “They tell me I now have four different ones, so I guess my immediate destiny is pretty much defined. Maybe not quite so fast as the doctors predict, but their job, I reckon, is to err on the side of cautious pessimism once the cards are spread out for all to read.

  “At first it was a real death sentence and it sent me into a mad panic. I hadn’t prepared for this at all. I felt like a wounded animal. And more than likely heading for a pretty painful end. I’d lived a bit of a riotous, self-centered life. People came and went—women, writers and artist-friends, drifters and grafters, con men and complacent peers, all certain, as I was, of long hedonistic lives lived for the day—and entirely for ourselves.

  “And then when the news came, I was suddenly alone—with a sense of slow drowning in this great empty ocean. Dark and cold and endless. The terrible void of utter meaninglessness. Did I grab at religion just to fight this nihilistic horror? I guess maybe I did. At first. You know—anything to believe in, to have faith in, was better than this slow drowning. But then things changed. The adventure—of life and beyond—returned. The realization that even though I’ll disappear as a physical entity, there remains the possibility of endless spiritual explorations throughout the hereafter.

  “I became intrigued by the prospect. A never-ending expedition into the spiritual universe. A rejection of the naïve ‘beginning-and-end’ theories and ways of thinking of today’s physicists and philosophers. You know—the first big bang explosion leading finally to the final whimpering implosion. The ultimate black hole that ultimately absorbs itself. It all seems too stupid—as if even our greatest minds, being incapable of conceiving ‘infinity,’ have to collapse the inconceivable to a petty little picture with a neat beginning, a lively middle, and a pathetic conclusion. Why can’t we just accept the fact that there are things our minds will never be able to wrap themselves around? Ideas so vast that all you can do is celebrate their immensity and accept the wonderful open-endedness of everything. Including the self and our vast, barely explored psychic reservoirs of past lives and experiences and karmic ripples! That was a time when, to quote someone famous whose names escapes me: ‘Mortality rested very lightly on my shoulders!’”

  He paused at that point. It was a long monologue, and even he seemed surprised by the scope and sear of it. He blinked, coughed, chuckled, and then leaned forward, half whispering: “I guess it must have been the LSD that did it. Once I discovered the glorious hidden mind behind the mundane day-to-day functioning mind, I knew our adventures—for each one of us—were meant to be vast and all-encompassing. The lowly old joints of marijuana opened quite a few mental doors and shutters too at the start. But LSD just blasts you off into the infinities. Problem is, if you’re not careful, you may not always come back. The wonderful thing is, though, when you do come back, you bring a hell of a lot with you. Almost too much sometimes. Your mind can feel as if it’s about to fragment into a gazillion pieces with all the new perceptions you discover. It’s scary as all hell first time, but you start to get used to it as you learn the stepping-stones out into the universe. It’s all so incredible. No wonder they try to ban this stuff. We’d all become so wise and ‘Tree of Knowledge’ all-knowing that the world as we see it wouldn’t exist anymore…and most of the things we’re programmed to value and revere wouldn’t matter a toss anymore. We’d see them for what they truly are—barriers and clamps on our amazing potentials—false gods and fake rewards of materialistic madness!

  “Of course, the old, unenlightened self still keeps lumbering out occasionally, even though I like to think I’m far beyond that now. But he’s still there—sudden panics at my predicament, great weeps at all my stupid actions and ignorance and lost loves and that kind of thing, whirling fantasies of chasing young nymphets like a rut-minded professor at some flea-bitten college…and of course that utter dread that I might be totally wrong. That all this rekindled
‘belief in the eternal-spiritual’ might be nothing more than just a frantic selfish scramble for a life belt in the face of an inevitable expiration—an end with no purpose, no continuity, no resonance, no nothing.”

  He paused, as if struck by the horror of his own dilemma—false faith or fatalistic futility. I expected him to weep. Or maybe even scream. But instead he just started to chuckle…

  Finally I said something. (It’s unusual for me to be quiet for so long.) “Maybe in the end that’s the best solution—facing life with a wink and a chuckle…I’ve always been fascinated by our inherent impermanence. Sogyal Rinpoche deals with that head-on in his Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I’m reading it at the moment. He uses a wave as one of his examples. In one way of looking at a wave, it has a very distinct identity, a beginning and an end, a birth and a death. But look at it another way and it doesn’t really exist at all, but is merely the result of the behavior of water—‘full’ of water but ‘empty’ of independent existence. It comes and goes. It’s constantly morphing into other forms and other waves—dependent on sets of always changing circumstances and related in its ‘emptiness’ to every other wave.

  “What I think he’s saying”—I seemed to be on a bit of a rhetorical roll now—“is that nothing has any inherent existence of its own. Doesn’t matter what it is—a tree, a house, a car—or you, even you! The closer you get to the essence of a ‘thing’ you realize that it’s made up of an awful lot of ‘no-thing,’ identical to all other things. Everything merges into incredibly complex and subtle webs of interconnectedness that link everything with everything across the universe. There’s no independent existence for anything. It’s all one unified, multidependent, interconnected existence. The butterfly’s wing syndrome—the infinities of ripples, the magic dance of genomes, the world of quantum physics. Things have no more reality than dreams. Everything—all particles exist potentially as different combinations of other particles or waves. At the quantum level waves and particles are interchangeable, so they say. ‘Death’ doesn’t really exist in a universal sense. It’s merely one more amazing transition—something you can finally accept with a ‘wink and a chuckle’ because, in many ways, it’s already a part of us all.”

  I think he heard me. He certainly kept on chuckling and staring out across the soaring cliffs beyond the shrine, the broken rocks at their base pounded by explosions of white surf and the vast horizon of the Atlantic under soaring galleon sails of cumulus clouds. But he nodded, as if something I’d said made sense for him. Then he slowly raised his arms as if addressing some great imaginary audience and very quietly, very precisely, he said: “I think I’m really ready for the start of the next journey now…Almost…”

  We sat silently together, letting the breezes stroke our faces and whisper through the clusters of white daisies growing wild along the cliff tops. Slowly I felt myself being absorbed into the silence of the land—an enduring expansive sense of stillness and benign solitude. An odd sense of emerging opened up around me—emerging from the edges of finite knowledge into a more rarefied state of beginner’s enlightment? A freshening of the spirit—a dreamtime of my imagination—a melting or melding into far larger visions—things endless—things with no beginning. Things infinite and full of peace and beauty. Things I hoped my newfound friend was discovering too in preparation for his “next journey”…

  8

  Moments of Meditation

  OF COURSE ANNE AND I HAVE dabbled in meditation. Who hasn’t? We’re certainly old enough, curious enough, and occasionally daft enough to have done enough dabbling for half a dozen lifetimes. And meditation certainly takes a lot less effort than seeking out golden toads in the Costa Rican cloud forests, or hunting for unique species of plants atop the soaring Tepui Plateaus in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, or any of a couple of dozen other zany “pursuits of the almost impossible” we seem to have undertaken in our endless and erratic quests for “secret places” and “lost worlds” described in my previous books.

  But unlike those other ventures, in the case of Buddhist-inspired meditation, we never seem to reach any specific destination. Assuming, of course, that there is any destination to be reached. Prior guides we’ve experienced along the mystical breathe-in-breathe-out route have emphasized that wonderful old saying: “There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path,” and freely admit that there are many times when they feel the constant dichotomy between ceaseless mind yammer and silent meditative now-ness is one that is ever challenging. “It’s a simple art, surrounded by complexities,” a colleague once told me after “an amazingly long” weekend meditation course. “I mean, you’d think your mind would actually enjoy switching itself off for a rest. Unfortunately, mine apparently doesn’t…”

  Our guide for the Tuesday morning “meditation for beginners” session at the Dzogchen Center was a blond-haired woman with a captivating smile and eyes that bored into you and never seemed to blink. She definitely looked like a meditation-maven. But she was also disarmingly honest at the outset by admitting, that despite her years of practice, she still had days when she felt herself to be at a novice stage, grappling with a mind so teeming with thoughts and emotions and imagined crises and gotta-do lists that she wondered why she’d ever considered meditation as a practice. “You never get ‘there,’” she said with a broad smile. “But sometimes you just know you’ve moved sideways into a different and far more peaceful space—and that suffices and encourages you to carry on.”

  Even Sogyal Rinpoche writes in his Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

  “There are so many ways to present meditation, and I must have taught it a thousand times, but each time it is different, and each time it is direct and fresh.” He goes on to suggest in colorful, honest language that “generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity…in intense and anxious struggles, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities. We are fragmented…We don’t know who we really are…So many contradictory voices, dictates and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere leaving nobody at home.” How many times have I thought that! Then I resolve to resolve the “waste” but invariably continue—after a guilt-laden period of nonreform—to continue just as before.

  “Meditation,” Sogyal suggests “is the exact opposite. It is a state in which we slowly begin to release all those emotions and concepts that have imprisoned us into the space of natural simplicity…We return to that deep inner nature that we have so long ago lost sight of. Meditation is bringing the mind back home, releasing and relaxing…and ultimately embodying a state of gentle transcendence which is why we are all here.”

  The luminosity of the shrine room here seems to engender transcendence. Sometimes silvery sheens of mist or glowering banks of dark cloud can create an otherworldly mystical sense of floating with only occasional glimpses of open ocean or ragged precipices tumbling down to churning surf-spumes. On other occasions the sun can be so dazzling on the sea and the myriad greens of the land that your eyes water with the intensity of it all. You’re not exactly crying, although on many occasions, you could indeed be tempted to weep at the overwhelming beauty of it all. On other occasions you might vanish into a dreamtime miasma of your own imaginings, living inside your own silences.

  On this particular day Anne and I are sitting on small cushions facing the ocean vistas (actually Anne is sitting on a chair because she thinks she’ll get cramps!). And it is the light that is the main feature of the room today. The light in the air and on the sea and the distant Skellig islands—that incredible pure molten platinum light that combines the intensity of silver with the sheen of gold but is more powerful than either in terms of its calming quality.

  Skelligs in a Storm

  The session begins gently with our guide reminding the dozen or so early morning participants to “follow the breath,” the slow, regular, in-ou
t rhythms of breathing that can allow us to circumvent the constant clamoring yammer of the mind and reach a quiet state of timeless now-ness. We’ve both tried this before, so her instructions are familiar.

  “We’ll begin now,” she says and gently taps the brass bowl with a small leather-wrapped stick. The sound echoes and re-echoes around the sun-bathed space and seems to go on for minutes until finally fading away into a delicious silence. And then of course begins the battle. A battle you’re trying to pretend is not a battle at all and doesn’t really exist except that pretending something doesn’t exist is, of course, already an admission that it does. The mind doesn’t like to be sidetracked. The mind is used to being the boss—center of all focus and attention. The mind demands to be heard even when it’s offering nothing but jumbled gobbledegook.

  “Concentrate on your breathing—the slow in and the slow out—forget everything else,” our guide says. So we do, and for a while it seems that the pathetic prattle of consciousness—that messy porridge of lists and forgotten must-dos and should-haves and could-haves and guilts and fears of futures that may never come and fears of repercussions of past action, or fears, as FDR suggested, just of fear itself—the whole ridiculous frantic flurry and scurry—it seems that it might actually be quieting down for once.

  For a while at least.

  But inevitably I do catch a sneak thought or two creeping in, even as I am studiously not thinking about thinking. I tell myself firmly that I shouldn’t think about the thought but instead try to think about nothing until the thought slinks away, unexamined, and leaves me nothing else to think about except wondering when the next sneak attack of thinking thoughts might be on its way. It’s that whole elephant-in-the-kitchen thing. Trying not to think about something everyone is thinking about but that you’ve all agreed not to think about because thinking about it would be a mutual recognition of the elephant’s existence, which of course you’re all trying to ignore.