When my face was erased

I wrote this piece about 11 years ago and almost published it in a glossy Buddhist magazine. Instead I put it away and came across it again recently, which is when the coda came about.

I met my new friend outside of a Buddhist shrine building in the Colorado wilderness one night in 2011. We were part of a little illicit gathering together, and I noticed him mostly because he shared his whiskey openly with the whole group and without hesitation. I drank back then.

In the spring of 2013, he was visiting Los Angeles on a two-month work contract and became a regular figure at the daily practice period I had recently organized at our meditation center.

Every night at rush hour, I helped lead a small group of meditators for an hour of sitting practice. My new friend had adopted this time as his home away from home. Sometimes a group of us would go out to dinner afterwards and when it was time to split the bill, discover the check was paid. My friend was an unassuming figure but remained a dignified beacon of generosity.

The night it happened was a Monday evening.

I was still distracted by the fading starlight of the weekend's fascinations. When practice concluded, I stepped outside, said a brief chant and offered the water from our shrine, pouring it at the base of a tree that kept watch over the perimeter of the center. When I finished, I locked the door to the patio and walked across the shrine room; I turned off the lights and stepped across the gateway and into the short hallway where people typically line up before practice. A grid of photographs hung there, portraits of smiling community members holding vigil over the empty center, a bouquet of cheerfulness.

I must have scanned them almost unconsciously when I saw it. Someone had carefully blacked out my eyes with a thick black sharpie. Mine was the only one defaced.

I saw a blockbuster film once where a plane is ripped open high in the sky. One moment, our hero is dozing in his seat and the next he is clinging to the same seat in mortal terror as his fellow passengers and their luggage shoot past him through the split-open hull into the starry night sky. What makes the scene work is the sudden enveloping roar that drowns out any chance of reasoning with the cold night sky.

In my memory of that night, I am overpowered by a gang of shadows. They collect in the chambers of my mind as a looming battalion of hostile figures. Suddenly there are enemies everywhere.

I had taken my Bodhisattva vow in a Sunday afternoon ceremony that closed out a week-long practice period over the previous Thanksgiving holiday. My hands shook as I clutched the liturgy; the convener spoke, I prostrated three times, and it was done. I helped collect the leftovers from the center's holiday dinner and announced, with only partial irony, and to unexpected applause that we were taking the food “down to the revolution.”

This was the fall in which Occupy Wall Street burst into bloom across the country. My girlfriend commented that the radio in her car that morning had seemed to pick up a lost signal from 1968. That afternoon we drove downtown on those ghostly empty streets that always mark Thanksgiving in a city of angelic midwestern transplants. Pulling up across the street from City Hall, it was like a medieval castle during battle, its grounds offering sanctuary to countless serfs, their numbers and good intentions forming a sort of protective energetic field.

When we drove back to the center that evening we joined in practicing the Sadhana of Mahamudra, a liturgy ostensibly composed in a cave in Taksang in 1968, “although I live in the slime and muck of the dark age, I still aspire to see your face.” The spirit of the practice felt urgent and preternaturally redolent of a world just beyond our walls and getting ever closer. I took my vow two days later, the following Sunday. Still bleary-eyed after a week of coordinating twelve-hour practice days, I got word that the Occupy Los Angeles encampment was going to be forcefully evicted at midnight by the LAPD.

Arriving downtown that night, the encampment spilled over its boundaries into formlessness. We entered the land and made our way across city hall property into a tent which had earlier belonged to a friend of ours but was now abandoned and offered freely. I crawled inside and lay on the ground listening to a counter-swarm of police and news helicopters overhead, eavesdropping on kids riding bikes; some made drug deals while others just sounded bored.

Laying still on the lawn of the Los Angeles city hall, a small piece of earth temporarily liberated from conscription as municipal territory, I felt as if I had entered some distilled space-time warping of the spirit of the 60s: the early proliferation of Buddhism in the US, the promise of the summer of love and the darkness of Altamont all coalescing into a storm around my filthy nylon cave. I left the encampment just before sunrise and walked back to where I had parked, marveling at the line of police cars many blocks deep.

The next evening was a crisp fall night, and I had wandered into a particularly charming hilly neighborhood close to my center. This is where I want to live, I thought. And three months later, out of nowhere, a beautiful, affordable home on that very block practically fell into my lap.

After I moved in, I began to hear murmurings of disapproval towards the family who lived across the street from us. In the house, three adult sons lived at home with their parents, and each had spent time in prison. One was mentally ill; another was a gangbanger. Once I awoke, disoriented, to what presented as a UFO but turned out to be an LAPD helicopter shining its floodlight down onto our block. I went to the window and watched as one of the sons was led out in cuffs. When another neighbor told me he hoped they would move, I wondered where they would go, thinking that there is no place to exile those people who scare or frustrate us, only a passing on of our frustrations to those outside of our sight.

The night I wrote this, the oldest son was asleep on my porch. His family had finally left for the desert a month before after living on the street for 35 years. He had no home and little more than a band aid on his face covering the place where he had tattooed a girl's name across his cheekbone. He had spent years in a California prison and once told me about the racial hierarchies inside as well as the uneven but always violent repercussions which come from sitting on the bunks of inmates of different races.

I wondered about his schizophrenic brother who was both timid and morbidly obese. He used to sit on the family porch across the street from us, like a coyote on the far side of a canyon. While the city slept, he cried out repeatedly like Sisyphus, endlessly attempting to adjust the balance of cosmos, that he might finally quiet his own ferocious mind.

I meditated a lot in those years. After long periods of intense practice, I would stand in silence among stones and plants and I would feel my feet firmly rooted to the earth. Fresh mind feels delightful. I was mesmerized to study the sea of light in the sky and its reflections all around me. It was simply beautiful.

When my photo was defaced, I was devout enough to look for a teaching that might help. I thought of that heavenly light and wondered if I had not recognized something important about how mind is always becoming caught in a similar sea of projections and reflections in which the source is always increasingly obscure. Maybe to be with others was to surrender to such endless waves and accept that we can only swim in the confusion, knowing that others will inevitably mark us with their own projections and re-imagine us in the image of their own minds and neuroses.

The night that I wrote this, I remember looking out at my street and thinking: this is my sangha now, sangha of trees and stars and broken bottles on the street. Each a bodhisattva. Each a teacher. I am the phenomenal world, and it is me - loneliness of loneliness, welcome home. The world is made from a fine thread that will inevitably include acts of undiluted aggression and surely I will do the same to others, and there is no escape and so I will continue to aspire to welcome it all with kindness.

Coda

I wrote this years ago. It took me that long to see that I was almost entirely wrong.

In Mahayana Buddhism, there is a view that all phenomena - praise and blame, pain and joy, kindness and cruelty, or the quiet generosity of my visiting friend and the aggression of an anonymous vandal - are empty of inherent essence, and that recognizing this is a path to liberation. I was deeply committed to that view. But that view also makes a good weapon.

Seeing my own face transformed into a soulless demon, I imagined the person who did it was suffering and confused, that I should meet their projection with compassion. That is a kind of absolute view about the nature of reality.

The relative truth is that someone abused my vulnerability within a place - an institution - that I had trusted to protect me but never did. The relative truth is also that my karma - nothing mystical, just the many expansive causes and conditions responsible for producing any given moment, as much Guattari as Siddhartha Gautama - meant my potential for being harmed if I responded without overt self-protection was great.

I left immediately after the incident. My time there was less an episode of what gets called spiritual bypassing then one of recalling for myself that defense mechanisms are not always confused or pathological.

Several years later, the organization crumbled due to much bigger and more significant harms. What amazes me now is how those much bigger harms were really of a very similar logic. In organizations like this one, tantric teaching is often used as a strategy - a kind of endless situational shift between absolute and relative depending what serves the powerful. When it is convenient, the absolute view is offered to negate the real harm and suffering and injustice of the relative. Which is really nothing but a form of dissociation.

Sometimes the mesmerically fascinating reflection of light amounts to nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Other times it is cast off a blade that is just as likely to be sharp in its precision as sharp in its violence. Sometimes, it’s better to look away and others, even, to walk away altogether.