Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [2]
Like many young people, I first discovered the ancient wisdom traditions as a college student. In my case I was a student at SUNY, Buffalo, when I attended a Zen retreat in Rochester, New York, in the late 1960s. You know the adage about the turbulent sixties: If you can remember them, you weren’t really there. In many ways I was very representative of my generation. I went to San Francisco for be-ins, discovered encounter groups and the hot springs at Esalen, marched on Washington, got teargassed at an anti-war demonstration near the Pentagon, and was rained on at the Woodstock Festival in 1969.
The war, student politics, and the peace movement created a special level of intensity. In 1970, my best friend Barry’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Allison Krause, was killed at Kent State when, incredibly, fellow Americans who were National Guardsmen from our heartland shot and killed four students. I was deeply and personally affected. As always, death, the great teacher, presented an opportunity for a wide range of penetrating and life-changing lessons. There was also a peculiar coincidence at Kent State that touched my life: One of the other students who was killed was, like me, named Jeffrey Miller, and he too came from Long Island. Friends and acquaintances who heard the news bulletin knew that I sometimes visited friends at Kent State; they became convinced that I was dead. In my parents’ home and my student apartment, the phones began ringing nonstop.
Allison’s funeral was a blur of emotions, so much sadness and so much grief. For months it seemed as though thoughts of Allison’s life and sudden violent death trivialized everything else. I was nineteen years old, and I had been brought face to face with death for the first time.
Only a few weekends earlier, Allison and Barry had come to visit me; I had been sleeping on the couch because they were sleeping in my bedroom. We had all been in the same kitchen, pouring milk out of the same cardboard container while we talked about our shared plans. Allison, like Barry, was an artist; I loved to write. We talked about traveling and the things we could do together. Allison and Barry were in love and wanted to get engaged; I had advised them against it, saying they had plenty of time. Teenage death was the last thing on my mind.
In this period following Kent State, I also couldn’t help thinking more about the Jeffrey Miller who was gunned down on his own college campus. The tragic photograph of his body lying in a pool of blood with an anguished young woman crying over him was everywhere. It could have been me. If I were to believe my ringing phone, it was me. This swift never-to-be-forgotten lesson in the fleeting nature of this life accelerated the ways in which my direction was changing.
During this painful time, my original life goals seemed more and more misguided and out of touch. I had spent the summer of 1969 working in a Manhattan law firm. Listening to the young Fifth Avenue lawyers complain had convinced me that I was not cut out to be one of the Gray Flannel fifties men, vying ceaselessly for a better berth on the Titanic. I knew that I wanted to learn more, not earn more. I had also begun to be disillusioned with radical politics and angry rhetoric. The concept of fighting for peace seemed a contradiction in terms. Kent State helped me realize that more than anything else I wanted to gentle myself and find a nonviolent way to contribute to a more harmonious and sane world.
The day after I graduated from college—alone with only the company of the Eternal Companion who I was still seeking—I started on my search by boarding a plane for London, where I had friends who were staying at a Sufi center. In my money belt was five hundred dollars saved from summer jobs and graduation presents, which I planned to stretch as far as possible. Within a short time, I crossed the channel to France. Writing poetry and hitchhiking, I started to make my way across Europe. In those days I had one main mantra, “Teach me what you know, whatever you call it.”
Looking for “wisdom”