A Mystic’s Journal
Wednesday, August 24
A new meditation student e-mailed a question today, after her first meditation. She was on a beach in Australia, and a friend came up and used up the entire time she had for meditation talking.
I wrote back and told her of my first meditation student, over twenty five years ago. A story I had forgotten ... I will repeat it here.
It happened that my friend Carolyn Fellman and I decided to go to Florida for a week in January one year. I had never been there. Carolyn was a director at the First Street Playhouse, I wrote music for a few of her productions. We drove for days and days - and seemed to get nowhere. We were going the speed limit, following the route marked out on our map ... We drove all day every day and into the night. It felt as though we were in a time/space warp. Finally, in order to have any vacation at all, we gave up on the Florida idea and decided to stop in North Carolina instead. We chose a small, nondescript motel on the sea. It was off season, and the town and the motel were both fairly deserted. We arrived on New Year’s Eve, and I decided that I would meditate on the beach at midnight, to bring in the New Year. I took a - with me, went down to the beach, faced east - and began to meditate. I heard firecrackers and fireworks down the beach as the new year began. At one point I half opened my eyes - and saw myself surrounded in Divine Light. It had been a terrible year, and I was glad to start a new one by myself, meditating on a peaceful beach, with my attention one-pointedly focused on the Divine.
About twenty minutes into my meditation I heard a woman’s voice somewhere nearby, above me on the pier. “Hiii. Hiii there. You meditatin’?” This phrase was repeated many times, like my inward mantra, only more frequent and insistent. Finally I opened my eyes. A beautiful blond woman was now standing over me, holding a gun. “Hii”, she said. “Hi”, I said. “Were you meditatin’?” “Yes”, I answered. She started to cry. Cry and speak. Her boyfriend had left her for another woman. There were staying here, at the motel. My new blond friend had come to kill them both. “You want to see the bullets?”, she asked. I said that yes, I very much would. She put them in my hand. I thanked her and put them in my pocket.
We walked up and down the beach. She cried, and we spoke about God and meditation. She finally said that she was going home and would try to forgive her boyfriend - and she promised not to come back to do them harm. I taught her how to meditate. My first student.
Suddenly the time/space warp made some sense. I was meant to prevent this woman from killing two people ... And ruin her own life. And to teach her to meditate.
A few years later the Dalai Lama of Tibet, on his first visit to the United States, came to our meditation center, near Ithaca. In that meeting, he taught us his method of meditation. Afterwards he asked that we meditate for some minutes together, and suggested that we send healing and love to the entire world as we meditated. When the meditation ended, I stood up and walked over to the coal stove. Two fellow students, both men, did the same. Our teacher, Anthony, was there also - and he looked through me with his piercing black eyes. I had no idea why I had gone over to the stove. I am a shy person, and over a hundred of my peers were still seated, quietly waiting for the Dalai Lama in his maroon robes to again speak. The three of us warmed our hands over the coal stove as I continued to wonder why I was standing there with them and Anthony.
A few years later my teacher Anthony developed lung cancer and had a lung removed. During that time, a friend asked me to teach her how to meditate. Then another. I told them that I was not qualified, but that my teacher Anthony would teach them after he was out of the hospital. They said they could not wait. I taught them, but said when Anthony had recovered, they would have to study with him. They agreed. Then another person asked me to teach her.
Anthony did not recover. He succumbed to cancer and passed on to other realms. I now had two meditation students and a third waiting. I asked some of my older fellow meditators if they would take my students, and they declined. I decided to stay with friends in New York City for a few months to think. While there, the third student called me periodically on the phone, to ask when I would return to Ithaca. She had rounded up a few other people who now wanted to learn how to meditate.
I finally returned to Ithaca and began teaching meditation and philosophy classes in a local bookstore. I chose Wednesday nights. After my classes began I heard that the other two men that had joined me around the coal stove that day years earlier - had started a Buddhist Meditation Center in town. Their classes were held on Wednesday nights. Apparently we three had volunteered, that day years earlier, before the Dalai Lama and Anthony.
I have been teaching meditation and philosophy every week since, for over twenty years.
A Mystic’s Journal August 24, 2005
Moderator: figaro