| Cougar Press PO Box 894 Meadview AZ 86444 |
| Confessions |
As a good little Catholic boy, I used to go to Confession all the time. The name of the
sacrament was actually "Penance," but we all referred to it as Confession. Penance was what we
had to do to make the absolution of our sins valid, e.g. fasting, sack cloth and ashes, three Hail
Marys. A big part of getting forgiven was being contrite, that is, sorry for our sins. Without true
contrition, one's escape from the doom of Purgatory was in question.
The questions that arose for me as I grew older and more thoughtful were:
Starting with the third question, my honest answer these days would have to be, "I don't know."
I used to think that I knew. It was all right there in the ten commandments. If only it had been
so simple.
To start, it wasn't "all right there in the ten commandments." There were the precepts of the
church. There were the additions that Jesus had made to the list: love God; love thy neighbor.
As I grew older, it seemed like the more I knew the less I knew. I learned that there were
exceptions and interpretations. These different ways of reading the biblical exhortations hit both
extremes. I had a math teacher in high school. Mr McCracken was a genius when it came to
subjects like algebra and geometry.
One day my friend, Ian McLean, and I stayed after class to continue a discussion with
McCracken that had come up during class. The subject was ostensibly irrelevant to the
curriculum, so we waited until the bell had rung before we closed in on the resolution of our little
debate.
The subject was baptism and salvation. In a nutshell, McCracken's opinion was that anyone
who died without having been baptized, and without having accepted Christ as his savior was
going straight to hell. The proposal that Ian and I put to our math teacher was this: What if a
man is born in the jungles of New Guinea? This fellow has a good heart. He lives his life with
honor, working hard, telling the truth, hurting no one, and so on. But he dies without ever
running into a missionary, a minister, a priest or any messenger from the Christian community.
He dies unbaptized without ever having professed to believe that Jesus was his savior. What
would happen to the soul of this man? That was our question, and McCracken's answer was
unequivocal. The simple savage would go straight to hell, there to burn for all eternity as
punishment for his failure to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior.
We left for our next class somewhat shaken and disillusioned. I suspect that Ian may already
have been something of an agnostic, if not a full-blown atheist. But in high school I still
considered myself to be a devout Christian.
Our disillusionment had nothing to do with faith in God or devotion to any religious
denomination. Rather, we were left wondering if the man whom we admired, the man with a
brain like a steel trap, the man who understood and taught to us the deep postulates of geometry
and algebra, had a screw loose. How could someone so intelligent and educated even entertain
the possibility that such an irrational condemnation of an innocent human would be the work of
a just God?
My own disillusionment deepened as I learned that McCracken was not alone in his beliefs.
He was some kind of Baptist, and the word was that all of the members of that denomination
were expected to believe that way. Other faiths were even worse in some ways. John Calvin,
whose teachings led to the establishment of such churches as the Reformed Church, the
Huguenots, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, maintained that not only were baptism
and profession of belief in Jesus Christ necessary to get into heaven, but that it was preordained.
Predestination was one of the things you were expected to believe if you attended one of these
congregations. Your own faith was actually no guarantee that you would make it. You would be
saved only if God had so created you from the very beginning.
At the other extreme was the concept that, if you fervently wished and hoped to believe in the
real God, you would find salvation and eternal glory even if you had never heard a word about
Jesus of Nazareth. This was more along the Roman Catholic version of things, and it was
somewhat easier to swallow, at least for me it was.
However, as I matured, my faith grew less secure when I learned that erudite theologians have
been debating these questions for centuries. If profound disagreements about such subjects as
faith and redemption, baptism and penance, right and wrong, and good and evil in all of its
many-headed forms can persist among devout men of learning, who was I, and how was I to
choose my own paths and my own beliefs with any measure of certitude?
I read the Bible, and then I read it again. I learned that Jesus' description of the two great
commandments came directly from old Jewish scriptures, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But I was
struck by the events portrayed in the Garden of Eden. I wondered. Was the Creator's offer of
all the fruits of the garden, with the exception of one, an order, or a warning? Might he not have
been telling Adam and Eve, humanity, not to presume to know anything about good and evil?
Many scoff at such an idea. Yet, eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is
defined as original sin. This is the sin that Baptism is supposed to wash away, the stain on our
souls that will be bleached white when we experience the rites of initiation into the faith. But, if
it could be such a catastrophe for Adam and Eve, how can we get away with it?
In the library of the University of San Diego, the Catholic college where I earned my degree, I
found one day an old book that purported to be a list of all the possible sins that a human could
commit. This was some tome! It covered all of the ten commandments, the six precepts, the
eight beatitudes, every virtue and every vice. The author had gone on endlessly enumerating all
of the ways that each of these rules could be transgressed. The book was huge. As I recall, it
had about nine hundred pages.
I remember thinking that the scholar who penned this work must have had a mind that was a
deep pit of fervent rot. First we had Dante telling us with sadistic glee all of the varieties of
torture that we might expect in hell. Now we had this expert on sin telling us all of the different
ways that we might get there.
I don't really know anything about good and evil or what constitutes sin. This page is about
confession. These days the church calls the sacrament formerly known as Penance,
Reconciliation. That's a much kinder word. It doesn't bring up the images of sack cloth and
ashes that penance conjures. I suspect that for some the word reconcile sounds a little too much
like an arrangement between equals, making deals with God, meeting Him halfway on the
subject of whether or not we have violated his commands.
As I remarked above, I really don't know about that. But the word confess continues to have the
same meaning that it has always had. In a broad sense, to confess is to admit the truth. We can
conceal the facts about anything without the need to know anything about right and wrong. We
can lie to ourselves and to others. We can deny reality in response to feelings of fear or haughty
privacy.
Confession is not, in any profound sense, a revelation of truth. It is merely an admission. It is
in this sense that I am confessing to the reader of this page of a website on the internet.
Although I would dearly wish that the words and pictures on this or that page might kindle some
flame of recognition, please don't expect me to hand over any profound description of reality.
On the subjects of philosophy, theology, cosmology, astronomy, physics, psychology,
physiology, history, religion and yoga, I know next to nothing. I do have forty plus years of
experience with various applications of yoga in my life, but I'm here to tell you that you will gain
more from your own experience than you ever will from mine.
When I was a boy, living in the country, I had a single shot .22 caliber rifle at my disposal, the
family gun, and I was an avid hunter. I was no expert, not even a sharpshooter, but I was
something of a marksman, and I usually hit whatever I was aiming at.
One day as I walked through a grove of tall eucalyptus, a great hawk came soaring overhead, its
mighty wings spread, motionless motion on a rising wind, and beautiful to anyone except,
perhaps, a fourteen-year-old hunter. Thoughtlessly, I raised my rifle and fired. The wings folded
and the bird dropped like a stone and lay dead at my feet. Close inspection revealed no wound
until at last I discovered the tiny hole drilled right through the center of the skull.
My emotions surged in a strange mixture of pride and shame. What an excellent shot, said the
voice in my head, you idiot! Now I could see the beauty in this dead lump of feathers, prettier
perhaps than any quail, dove or duck. There was nothing to eat. There was nothing to wear.
There was no story to tell. There would be no bragging to entertain the campfire crowd.
I never shot another hawk, eagle or owl, but forever my conscience has borne the wound of that
event. Had all other hunters duplicated my thoughtless act, there would be no more birds of
prey. We would be inundated with swarms of rats and rabbits.
Yet, people have shot hawks and eagles with never a qualm, believing them to be vermin. The
same attitude has prevailed at times in the execution of coyotes, bobcats, wolves and grizzly
bears. In ancient times we admired the hunter with bear claws about his neck or eagle feathers in
his hair. Yet, standing in numb shock and gazing down at the dead bird at my feet, I wanted to
weep.
We knew a lady who lived out in the hills, and she had a son. When the lad was a teenager, he
was at a party one night. This was a no-host affair, one of those spontaneous gatherings out at
some dirt crossroad in the middle of the night, a bring-your-own-beer-and-wine revelry of teens
and adults, surfers, cowboys and farmhands.
In the course of the evening, for reasons that we will never know, a man delivered a threat to our
young fellow. "I'm going to kill you," he said.
We can wonder whether those words were meant to be a threat, a warning or a dare. We can
wonder if the illegal immigrant who spoke the menacing promise even knew what he was saying,
or meant it. Perhaps he was just trying to scare our young hero. Perhaps he was a cowardly
bully. Maybe he felt that his machismo had been challenged by something the boy had said or
done. I don't know if he was angry or exaggerating. Maybe he just wanted the kid to go home.
Well, the kid did go home. He may have been about seventeen, too young to be drinking, too
young to be out carousing in the dangerous darkness. He went home, walking across the stubble
of lima beans, guided by the distant light that was the house that he shared with his mother and
his two older sisters.
When he got to the house, he fetched his .30-30, and went back out into the night. Again he
walked across the fallow field, back to the party. When he got there, he shot the man dead, the
man who had said that he was going to kill him.
Although he went to trial for this act, our brave fellow was not convicted of murder or anything
else. In fact, he was acquitted. Self-defense was the plea, and his rich grandmother's high-priced
lawyers made it stick. Had the migrant farm hand been charged with such an offense, he
probably would have been locked up for twenty years and then deported. This reality hardly
impinges on the justice that was done, and I am proud of the son of my family's friend.
I can't help but ask myself what I would have done in that situation. When does a threat become
a warning? When does a warning become a prediction? As a devotee of Raja Yoga, I make
some effort to cling to the idea of non-injury. However, I also have a brain, a mind if you will,
and I can reason about possible outcomes. Suppose, for example, that I have the opportunity to
terminate the life of one who, if left to go on living, will injure many innocent people. My failure
to injure him thus becomes the indirect cause of injury to others. Is the simple yogi supposed to
relax in the naive assumption that his failure to act is better for everyone?
I am also a veteran of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. The term "armed
force" conveys an unmistakable meaning, doesn't it?
But this is a page devoted to confession. I have no illusion that any of this revelation is going to
clean my soul. I just want you, the reader, to get the biggest dose of relevant truth from your
perusal of these pages in your quest for pertinent information about the practice of Yoga. For
instance, I am brain-damaged. I considered titling the site, "Yoga for the Brain-damaged
Mystic." Had I done so, you might not be reading this right now.
So, how did I become "brain-damaged?" In 1991 I underwent surgery to remove a benign
tumor, a meningioma, from the left frontal lobe of my cerebrum. A meningioma is defined as "a
slow-growing benign tumor that affects the meninges of the brain or spinal cord and may cause
serious damage by compression." That's what it was doing. The little rascal had grown so large
that it was compressing my brain within the confines of my skull.
This compression was causing some interesting experiences. I would occasionally have this
feeling that, when asked to describe it, I would compare to the sensations of nostalgia and déjà
vu. To myself I referred to these events as spells, and they were real attention-getters. I didn't
lose consciousness, fall down or bite my tongue, but deep in my mind I would hear the voice of a
woman saying, "Uh huh. Uh huh." As a matter of fact, this lady's tone of voice had a distinct
sardonic flavor, as if she had caught me at my own game.
This went on over a period of months. I was working as an electrician, and, when I would feel
that one of these short episodes was about to transpire, I had the sense to come down off of my
stepladder or make sure that I was in a safe position. I learned later that this foreshadowing
feeling was called an "aura."
I kept these occurrences to myself. I actually enjoyed them. To be trite, they were riveting.
They commanded all of my attention during the few seconds while they lasted. I seriously
wondered whether I was not being visited by some divine presence, an angel perhaps, or a
goddess.
On separate occasions, my brother and my wife both noticed my having one of these spells.
"What was that?" the witness would ask.
"What was what?" I replied.
My dear wife began making appointments for me with a neurologist. I wouldn't keep them. My
electrical business commanded my attention. More than that, I felt vaguely guilty about my
little spells, perhaps because I liked them, or maybe because I feared that deep down inside my
brain I was sick. Nevertheless...
Eventually I did show up for one of the appointments. The neurologist did some tests, and he
administered an EEG. Electroencephalograms amount to a recording of electrical activity within
the brain. Mine was distinctly abnormal. After consulting with me, the neurologist transferred
my case to the Veteran's Hospital. He also scheduled me for a CAT scan.
When I showed up for the CAT scan a week or so later, I had been told by the doctor that
following the scan I should just go on about my business, and that he would get in touch with me
about the results in a couple of days. However, at the conclusion of the test, the technician in
charge asked me to stay for a bit in the waiting room, just in case the physician had any
instructions for me. I sat down with eerie premonition.
In a minute my neurologist burst into the waiting room carrying with him the large negatives
that were the results of the CAT scan. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he had beads of
sweat popping out on his forehead. He was twenty eight years old at the time. I was fifteen years
older, and I was handling the situation much more calmly than he was, but then I didn't yet
know what the situation was.
My neurologist showed me the results on the large pieces of film, saying as he did so that this
was probably the best way to explain it to me. What I saw was obviously a picture of my brain.
On the one side, there was a very distinct object.
The size of the tumor was compared to that of an egg or a lemon. The pressure caused by this
benign intrusion inside of my cranium is what was prompting the seizures. Nobody called them
"spells" anymore. Around this time, as though coming out of a period of denial, I became
aware of a constant band of pain that encircled my skull. I was one sick puppy.
The doctor insisted that I be admitted immediately to the hospital. I resisted this idea strongly.
I was still failing to admit that there was anything wrong with me. How bad is it to be hearing
the voice of a goddess anyhow?
I didn't say that to the good doctor. What I did say was that it was impossible for me to check
into the hospital right then. I had jobs underway, money to earn, a wife, two kids, two cars and
a home to support.
"Leave me alone. I'm fine."
"You could die on the way home." This was the doctor speaking.
"I don't care. I have lots of life insurance." This was true, and I really was not afraid of dying.
Life had been very difficult. We were poor, and the idea of suddenly being released from all of
the strain and responsibility, as well as leaving behind a rich wife, had a certain appeal. Of
course, in the condition that I was in, I wasn't thinking very straight. The doctor's next remark
straightened my thoughts right out.
"You could have a stroke," he said.
Hmmm. Having a stroke didn't sound like any fun at all. My smug pride started to kick in.
Death has a certain glamor and dignity. Having a stroke is just some old spastic drooling on
himself.
I figured that I should make a couple of telephone calls. I went to a phone booth near the
hospital entrance, and I called my brother. I surprised myself, while filling him in on what was
going on, by bursting into tears. Now where did that come from? I wondered.
I was considerably more composed when I spoke to my wife. I told her that I would be in the
hospital, at least for the night.
They put me on phenytoin, trade name Dilantin, right away, to control the seizures, and they
also gave me medicine to reduce the swelling in my brain. This happened on a Friday.
On Saturday my doctor came and talked to me. His message was a bit of a surprise. They were
going to operate as soon as possible, he said, maybe as early as Monday. But today I was going
to check out of the hospital and go home.
"Spend time with your wife and kids," he advised. "Go and have dinner at your favorite
restaurant. Spend some quality time. Tomorrow afternoon, sometime before dinner, I want you
to check back in to the hospital. With any luck, the surgery will be performed the following
day."
Although this sounded ominous, I took it in a good way. But what was he telling me? Was I
supposed to be bidding my family a fond farewell? Was this to be our last dinner at the Mexican
restaurant in Old Town?
The operation was delayed until Tuesday, the first day of October. On Monday I had an
angiogram, a procedure wherein a catheter was inserted into my femoral artery at the groin and
pushed carefully up, through the aorta, through the heart, on up through the carotid artery and
finally into the anterior cerebral artery. Then a contrast dye was injected, and x-rays of that
portion of my brain were taken.
The doctors had originally told me that the operation would be fairly simple, and that they
would merely enter my brain and pluck the intrusive tumor from its seat in the left frontal lobe
just behind the primary visual cortex. However, the results of the angiogram revealed that the
arteries on the left side of my brain had been monopolized by the meningioma, so much so that
the arteries on the right side had sent tributaries across the top of my cranial cavity to bring
oxygen and energy to the left side.
What this meant was that the surgeon, rather than merely plucking the offending growth from
the brain, would have to go in and whittle it away, taking great care not to nick the arteries
which were coiled up inside of the tumor. During the operation, they had my left carotid artery
exposed in my throat with a clamp ready to instantly pinch it off in the event that the surgeon
might nick the blood vessel. If this happened, they told me, and the artery was not clamped, I
could bleed to death in four seconds.
The operation took fourteen hours, but it went well, and when I awoke my faithful wife was
waiting by the side of my bed. The surgeon came to see me. He told me that I had only had a
50% chance of surviving the operation. If I hadn't been in such good shape, he said, I probably
wouldn't have made it. Chalk one up for Yoga.
When I had asked my neurologist, on the discovery of the brain tumor, just how or why it was
there, he only shrugged. He couldn't say, but he did ask me if I had ever been knocked out by a
blow to my head. He described how such a trauma, like a grain of sand in an oyster, could lead
over time to the lemon-sized gem, the pearl that we now had to deal with.
I didn't at first recall any such event, but then I remembered lying on my back on the deck of the
berthing compartment of a destroyer. I was part of the crew, and a couple of my shipmates were
asking me if I was alright.
I told them that I was fine. I didn't need their help. I didn't realize that I had been
unconscious. This was back in 1974. It was seventeen years later that the symptoms of this
trauma became pronounced enough to notice. My little pearl had become a teenager, and it
wanted my attention now.
The irony of this story is that I had fallen backward onto my head while performing the sun
exercise. I was determined to stay in shape during our six-month cruise across the Pacific and
back. I didn't want to turn into one of those lumps of sailor fat that I observed all too
frequently, guys whose jobs provided no real exercise, guys who spent their time off eating and
sleeping. I used to jog around the ship on the main deck. I used structures up on the signal
bridge to do chin-ups and dips. And when I could, I did some Yoga.
When we were in port, I could do my asanas in the pilot house, for that was my territory. But
when we were underway, the pilot house was occupied by the officer of the deck, the junior
officer of the deck, the quartermaster, a radio man, the helmsman and other boatswain's mates,
and sometimes even the skipper. Since for six months we were at sea most of the time, I did my
bending and stretching down in our berthing compartment.
In retrospect, I realize that I should have restricted my exercises to the kind that can be done
lying down or sitting, asanas such as the plow, the cobra or the twist.
sacrament was actually "Penance," but we all referred to it as Confession. Penance was what we
had to do to make the absolution of our sins valid, e.g. fasting, sack cloth and ashes, three Hail
Marys. A big part of getting forgiven was being contrite, that is, sorry for our sins. Without true
contrition, one's escape from the doom of Purgatory was in question.
The questions that arose for me as I grew older and more thoughtful were:
- What does it mean to be truly sorry?
- What do I have to be sorry for?
- What are sins anyhow?
Starting with the third question, my honest answer these days would have to be, "I don't know."
I used to think that I knew. It was all right there in the ten commandments. If only it had been
so simple.
To start, it wasn't "all right there in the ten commandments." There were the precepts of the
church. There were the additions that Jesus had made to the list: love God; love thy neighbor.
As I grew older, it seemed like the more I knew the less I knew. I learned that there were
exceptions and interpretations. These different ways of reading the biblical exhortations hit both
extremes. I had a math teacher in high school. Mr McCracken was a genius when it came to
subjects like algebra and geometry.
One day my friend, Ian McLean, and I stayed after class to continue a discussion with
McCracken that had come up during class. The subject was ostensibly irrelevant to the
curriculum, so we waited until the bell had rung before we closed in on the resolution of our little
debate.
The subject was baptism and salvation. In a nutshell, McCracken's opinion was that anyone
who died without having been baptized, and without having accepted Christ as his savior was
going straight to hell. The proposal that Ian and I put to our math teacher was this: What if a
man is born in the jungles of New Guinea? This fellow has a good heart. He lives his life with
honor, working hard, telling the truth, hurting no one, and so on. But he dies without ever
running into a missionary, a minister, a priest or any messenger from the Christian community.
He dies unbaptized without ever having professed to believe that Jesus was his savior. What
would happen to the soul of this man? That was our question, and McCracken's answer was
unequivocal. The simple savage would go straight to hell, there to burn for all eternity as
punishment for his failure to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior.
We left for our next class somewhat shaken and disillusioned. I suspect that Ian may already
have been something of an agnostic, if not a full-blown atheist. But in high school I still
considered myself to be a devout Christian.
Our disillusionment had nothing to do with faith in God or devotion to any religious
denomination. Rather, we were left wondering if the man whom we admired, the man with a
brain like a steel trap, the man who understood and taught to us the deep postulates of geometry
and algebra, had a screw loose. How could someone so intelligent and educated even entertain
the possibility that such an irrational condemnation of an innocent human would be the work of
a just God?
My own disillusionment deepened as I learned that McCracken was not alone in his beliefs.
He was some kind of Baptist, and the word was that all of the members of that denomination
were expected to believe that way. Other faiths were even worse in some ways. John Calvin,
whose teachings led to the establishment of such churches as the Reformed Church, the
Huguenots, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, maintained that not only were baptism
and profession of belief in Jesus Christ necessary to get into heaven, but that it was preordained.
Predestination was one of the things you were expected to believe if you attended one of these
congregations. Your own faith was actually no guarantee that you would make it. You would be
saved only if God had so created you from the very beginning.
At the other extreme was the concept that, if you fervently wished and hoped to believe in the
real God, you would find salvation and eternal glory even if you had never heard a word about
Jesus of Nazareth. This was more along the Roman Catholic version of things, and it was
somewhat easier to swallow, at least for me it was.
However, as I matured, my faith grew less secure when I learned that erudite theologians have
been debating these questions for centuries. If profound disagreements about such subjects as
faith and redemption, baptism and penance, right and wrong, and good and evil in all of its
many-headed forms can persist among devout men of learning, who was I, and how was I to
choose my own paths and my own beliefs with any measure of certitude?
I read the Bible, and then I read it again. I learned that Jesus' description of the two great
commandments came directly from old Jewish scriptures, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But I was
struck by the events portrayed in the Garden of Eden. I wondered. Was the Creator's offer of
all the fruits of the garden, with the exception of one, an order, or a warning? Might he not have
been telling Adam and Eve, humanity, not to presume to know anything about good and evil?
Many scoff at such an idea. Yet, eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is
defined as original sin. This is the sin that Baptism is supposed to wash away, the stain on our
souls that will be bleached white when we experience the rites of initiation into the faith. But, if
it could be such a catastrophe for Adam and Eve, how can we get away with it?
In the library of the University of San Diego, the Catholic college where I earned my degree, I
found one day an old book that purported to be a list of all the possible sins that a human could
commit. This was some tome! It covered all of the ten commandments, the six precepts, the
eight beatitudes, every virtue and every vice. The author had gone on endlessly enumerating all
of the ways that each of these rules could be transgressed. The book was huge. As I recall, it
had about nine hundred pages.
I remember thinking that the scholar who penned this work must have had a mind that was a
deep pit of fervent rot. First we had Dante telling us with sadistic glee all of the varieties of
torture that we might expect in hell. Now we had this expert on sin telling us all of the different
ways that we might get there.
I don't really know anything about good and evil or what constitutes sin. This page is about
confession. These days the church calls the sacrament formerly known as Penance,
Reconciliation. That's a much kinder word. It doesn't bring up the images of sack cloth and
ashes that penance conjures. I suspect that for some the word reconcile sounds a little too much
like an arrangement between equals, making deals with God, meeting Him halfway on the
subject of whether or not we have violated his commands.
As I remarked above, I really don't know about that. But the word confess continues to have the
same meaning that it has always had. In a broad sense, to confess is to admit the truth. We can
conceal the facts about anything without the need to know anything about right and wrong. We
can lie to ourselves and to others. We can deny reality in response to feelings of fear or haughty
privacy.
Confession is not, in any profound sense, a revelation of truth. It is merely an admission. It is
in this sense that I am confessing to the reader of this page of a website on the internet.
Although I would dearly wish that the words and pictures on this or that page might kindle some
flame of recognition, please don't expect me to hand over any profound description of reality.
On the subjects of philosophy, theology, cosmology, astronomy, physics, psychology,
physiology, history, religion and yoga, I know next to nothing. I do have forty plus years of
experience with various applications of yoga in my life, but I'm here to tell you that you will gain
more from your own experience than you ever will from mine.
When I was a boy, living in the country, I had a single shot .22 caliber rifle at my disposal, the
family gun, and I was an avid hunter. I was no expert, not even a sharpshooter, but I was
something of a marksman, and I usually hit whatever I was aiming at.
One day as I walked through a grove of tall eucalyptus, a great hawk came soaring overhead, its
mighty wings spread, motionless motion on a rising wind, and beautiful to anyone except,
perhaps, a fourteen-year-old hunter. Thoughtlessly, I raised my rifle and fired. The wings folded
and the bird dropped like a stone and lay dead at my feet. Close inspection revealed no wound
until at last I discovered the tiny hole drilled right through the center of the skull.
My emotions surged in a strange mixture of pride and shame. What an excellent shot, said the
voice in my head, you idiot! Now I could see the beauty in this dead lump of feathers, prettier
perhaps than any quail, dove or duck. There was nothing to eat. There was nothing to wear.
There was no story to tell. There would be no bragging to entertain the campfire crowd.
I never shot another hawk, eagle or owl, but forever my conscience has borne the wound of that
event. Had all other hunters duplicated my thoughtless act, there would be no more birds of
prey. We would be inundated with swarms of rats and rabbits.
Yet, people have shot hawks and eagles with never a qualm, believing them to be vermin. The
same attitude has prevailed at times in the execution of coyotes, bobcats, wolves and grizzly
bears. In ancient times we admired the hunter with bear claws about his neck or eagle feathers in
his hair. Yet, standing in numb shock and gazing down at the dead bird at my feet, I wanted to
weep.
We knew a lady who lived out in the hills, and she had a son. When the lad was a teenager, he
was at a party one night. This was a no-host affair, one of those spontaneous gatherings out at
some dirt crossroad in the middle of the night, a bring-your-own-beer-and-wine revelry of teens
and adults, surfers, cowboys and farmhands.
In the course of the evening, for reasons that we will never know, a man delivered a threat to our
young fellow. "I'm going to kill you," he said.
We can wonder whether those words were meant to be a threat, a warning or a dare. We can
wonder if the illegal immigrant who spoke the menacing promise even knew what he was saying,
or meant it. Perhaps he was just trying to scare our young hero. Perhaps he was a cowardly
bully. Maybe he felt that his machismo had been challenged by something the boy had said or
done. I don't know if he was angry or exaggerating. Maybe he just wanted the kid to go home.
Well, the kid did go home. He may have been about seventeen, too young to be drinking, too
young to be out carousing in the dangerous darkness. He went home, walking across the stubble
of lima beans, guided by the distant light that was the house that he shared with his mother and
his two older sisters.
When he got to the house, he fetched his .30-30, and went back out into the night. Again he
walked across the fallow field, back to the party. When he got there, he shot the man dead, the
man who had said that he was going to kill him.
Although he went to trial for this act, our brave fellow was not convicted of murder or anything
else. In fact, he was acquitted. Self-defense was the plea, and his rich grandmother's high-priced
lawyers made it stick. Had the migrant farm hand been charged with such an offense, he
probably would have been locked up for twenty years and then deported. This reality hardly
impinges on the justice that was done, and I am proud of the son of my family's friend.
I can't help but ask myself what I would have done in that situation. When does a threat become
a warning? When does a warning become a prediction? As a devotee of Raja Yoga, I make
some effort to cling to the idea of non-injury. However, I also have a brain, a mind if you will,
and I can reason about possible outcomes. Suppose, for example, that I have the opportunity to
terminate the life of one who, if left to go on living, will injure many innocent people. My failure
to injure him thus becomes the indirect cause of injury to others. Is the simple yogi supposed to
relax in the naive assumption that his failure to act is better for everyone?
I am also a veteran of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. The term "armed
force" conveys an unmistakable meaning, doesn't it?
But this is a page devoted to confession. I have no illusion that any of this revelation is going to
clean my soul. I just want you, the reader, to get the biggest dose of relevant truth from your
perusal of these pages in your quest for pertinent information about the practice of Yoga. For
instance, I am brain-damaged. I considered titling the site, "Yoga for the Brain-damaged
Mystic." Had I done so, you might not be reading this right now.
So, how did I become "brain-damaged?" In 1991 I underwent surgery to remove a benign
tumor, a meningioma, from the left frontal lobe of my cerebrum. A meningioma is defined as "a
slow-growing benign tumor that affects the meninges of the brain or spinal cord and may cause
serious damage by compression." That's what it was doing. The little rascal had grown so large
that it was compressing my brain within the confines of my skull.
This compression was causing some interesting experiences. I would occasionally have this
feeling that, when asked to describe it, I would compare to the sensations of nostalgia and déjà
vu. To myself I referred to these events as spells, and they were real attention-getters. I didn't
lose consciousness, fall down or bite my tongue, but deep in my mind I would hear the voice of a
woman saying, "Uh huh. Uh huh." As a matter of fact, this lady's tone of voice had a distinct
sardonic flavor, as if she had caught me at my own game.
This went on over a period of months. I was working as an electrician, and, when I would feel
that one of these short episodes was about to transpire, I had the sense to come down off of my
stepladder or make sure that I was in a safe position. I learned later that this foreshadowing
feeling was called an "aura."
I kept these occurrences to myself. I actually enjoyed them. To be trite, they were riveting.
They commanded all of my attention during the few seconds while they lasted. I seriously
wondered whether I was not being visited by some divine presence, an angel perhaps, or a
goddess.
On separate occasions, my brother and my wife both noticed my having one of these spells.
"What was that?" the witness would ask.
"What was what?" I replied.
My dear wife began making appointments for me with a neurologist. I wouldn't keep them. My
electrical business commanded my attention. More than that, I felt vaguely guilty about my
little spells, perhaps because I liked them, or maybe because I feared that deep down inside my
brain I was sick. Nevertheless...
Eventually I did show up for one of the appointments. The neurologist did some tests, and he
administered an EEG. Electroencephalograms amount to a recording of electrical activity within
the brain. Mine was distinctly abnormal. After consulting with me, the neurologist transferred
my case to the Veteran's Hospital. He also scheduled me for a CAT scan.
When I showed up for the CAT scan a week or so later, I had been told by the doctor that
following the scan I should just go on about my business, and that he would get in touch with me
about the results in a couple of days. However, at the conclusion of the test, the technician in
charge asked me to stay for a bit in the waiting room, just in case the physician had any
instructions for me. I sat down with eerie premonition.
In a minute my neurologist burst into the waiting room carrying with him the large negatives
that were the results of the CAT scan. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he had beads of
sweat popping out on his forehead. He was twenty eight years old at the time. I was fifteen years
older, and I was handling the situation much more calmly than he was, but then I didn't yet
know what the situation was.
My neurologist showed me the results on the large pieces of film, saying as he did so that this
was probably the best way to explain it to me. What I saw was obviously a picture of my brain.
On the one side, there was a very distinct object.
The size of the tumor was compared to that of an egg or a lemon. The pressure caused by this
benign intrusion inside of my cranium is what was prompting the seizures. Nobody called them
"spells" anymore. Around this time, as though coming out of a period of denial, I became
aware of a constant band of pain that encircled my skull. I was one sick puppy.
The doctor insisted that I be admitted immediately to the hospital. I resisted this idea strongly.
I was still failing to admit that there was anything wrong with me. How bad is it to be hearing
the voice of a goddess anyhow?
I didn't say that to the good doctor. What I did say was that it was impossible for me to check
into the hospital right then. I had jobs underway, money to earn, a wife, two kids, two cars and
a home to support.
"Leave me alone. I'm fine."
"You could die on the way home." This was the doctor speaking.
"I don't care. I have lots of life insurance." This was true, and I really was not afraid of dying.
Life had been very difficult. We were poor, and the idea of suddenly being released from all of
the strain and responsibility, as well as leaving behind a rich wife, had a certain appeal. Of
course, in the condition that I was in, I wasn't thinking very straight. The doctor's next remark
straightened my thoughts right out.
"You could have a stroke," he said.
Hmmm. Having a stroke didn't sound like any fun at all. My smug pride started to kick in.
Death has a certain glamor and dignity. Having a stroke is just some old spastic drooling on
himself.
I figured that I should make a couple of telephone calls. I went to a phone booth near the
hospital entrance, and I called my brother. I surprised myself, while filling him in on what was
going on, by bursting into tears. Now where did that come from? I wondered.
I was considerably more composed when I spoke to my wife. I told her that I would be in the
hospital, at least for the night.
They put me on phenytoin, trade name Dilantin, right away, to control the seizures, and they
also gave me medicine to reduce the swelling in my brain. This happened on a Friday.
On Saturday my doctor came and talked to me. His message was a bit of a surprise. They were
going to operate as soon as possible, he said, maybe as early as Monday. But today I was going
to check out of the hospital and go home.
"Spend time with your wife and kids," he advised. "Go and have dinner at your favorite
restaurant. Spend some quality time. Tomorrow afternoon, sometime before dinner, I want you
to check back in to the hospital. With any luck, the surgery will be performed the following
day."
Although this sounded ominous, I took it in a good way. But what was he telling me? Was I
supposed to be bidding my family a fond farewell? Was this to be our last dinner at the Mexican
restaurant in Old Town?
The operation was delayed until Tuesday, the first day of October. On Monday I had an
angiogram, a procedure wherein a catheter was inserted into my femoral artery at the groin and
pushed carefully up, through the aorta, through the heart, on up through the carotid artery and
finally into the anterior cerebral artery. Then a contrast dye was injected, and x-rays of that
portion of my brain were taken.
The doctors had originally told me that the operation would be fairly simple, and that they
would merely enter my brain and pluck the intrusive tumor from its seat in the left frontal lobe
just behind the primary visual cortex. However, the results of the angiogram revealed that the
arteries on the left side of my brain had been monopolized by the meningioma, so much so that
the arteries on the right side had sent tributaries across the top of my cranial cavity to bring
oxygen and energy to the left side.
What this meant was that the surgeon, rather than merely plucking the offending growth from
the brain, would have to go in and whittle it away, taking great care not to nick the arteries
which were coiled up inside of the tumor. During the operation, they had my left carotid artery
exposed in my throat with a clamp ready to instantly pinch it off in the event that the surgeon
might nick the blood vessel. If this happened, they told me, and the artery was not clamped, I
could bleed to death in four seconds.
The operation took fourteen hours, but it went well, and when I awoke my faithful wife was
waiting by the side of my bed. The surgeon came to see me. He told me that I had only had a
50% chance of surviving the operation. If I hadn't been in such good shape, he said, I probably
wouldn't have made it. Chalk one up for Yoga.
When I had asked my neurologist, on the discovery of the brain tumor, just how or why it was
there, he only shrugged. He couldn't say, but he did ask me if I had ever been knocked out by a
blow to my head. He described how such a trauma, like a grain of sand in an oyster, could lead
over time to the lemon-sized gem, the pearl that we now had to deal with.
I didn't at first recall any such event, but then I remembered lying on my back on the deck of the
berthing compartment of a destroyer. I was part of the crew, and a couple of my shipmates were
asking me if I was alright.
I told them that I was fine. I didn't need their help. I didn't realize that I had been
unconscious. This was back in 1974. It was seventeen years later that the symptoms of this
trauma became pronounced enough to notice. My little pearl had become a teenager, and it
wanted my attention now.
The irony of this story is that I had fallen backward onto my head while performing the sun
exercise. I was determined to stay in shape during our six-month cruise across the Pacific and
back. I didn't want to turn into one of those lumps of sailor fat that I observed all too
frequently, guys whose jobs provided no real exercise, guys who spent their time off eating and
sleeping. I used to jog around the ship on the main deck. I used structures up on the signal
bridge to do chin-ups and dips. And when I could, I did some Yoga.
When we were in port, I could do my asanas in the pilot house, for that was my territory. But
when we were underway, the pilot house was occupied by the officer of the deck, the junior
officer of the deck, the quartermaster, a radio man, the helmsman and other boatswain's mates,
and sometimes even the skipper. Since for six months we were at sea most of the time, I did my
bending and stretching down in our berthing compartment.
In retrospect, I realize that I should have restricted my exercises to the kind that can be done
lying down or sitting, asanas such as the plow, the cobra or the twist.
| Yoga for Carnivores by Jay Dyck |