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Dhamette: Gil's Stories (2 of 5) Edging Toward Buddhism

So, hello from the Insight Meditation Center. This week I'm going to continue talking about my stories from my practice life, kind of in a chronological way. Yesterday I brought myself up to when I learned about San Francisco Zen Center^[2].

First, I was hitchhiking into Northern California to meet up with a college friend. I stayed at her house and went over to San Francisco Zen Center a couple of times over a weekend, and got a sense of what was there and what was possible. I remember receiving Zen meditation instructions early in the morning, staying for the dharma talk, and hearing the abbot there for the first time. I thought this was quite interesting and decided I wanted to go back.

But I then went hitchhiking with my friend into Northern California, up to Oregon, visiting communes that existed there. This must have been 1975. We stayed at different communes. We stayed in one in Oregon, close to Cave Junction, called the Meadows. It was a very simple life that we lived there on the land. My friend and I had this beautiful little hobbit hut with a loft and a bed, right on the edge of a beautiful grove of cedar trees. It was magical to be there, like a fairy tale.

Eventually, I wrote to San Francisco Zen Center to ask if I could come back and be a guest student for two weeks. I went back and continued meditating with them, living that life. To this day, I remember what it was like to sit in the meditation hall there. It's down in the basement, very quiet, very peaceful, with the noise of the city just outside the walls. There was this amazing juxtaposition of the noise outside and the silence inside. It certainly was challenging for me to sit there, but mostly that was physical at that time.

But there was an experience of peace, an experience of wholeness, of being connected to myself in a fuller way that reminded me of sailing across the Atlantic that I had done just a little while before that. I was really taken by the life there. After two weeks, I decided I wanted to come back to Zen Center to be more actively involved.

However, I had this idea that I wasn't ready at that point. I was 20 years old, about to turn 21, and I had dropped out of college. I decided I had to take care of a few things before going to do Zen practice. One of those things was to go back to the country where I was born, Norway, to see what my relationship to that country was and to figure something out there.

I went back, and it almost took me in a different direction because I went to live and work with two wonderful friends on their small farm in southern Norway. I loved that lifestyle. One of the important experiences there was that, because I was taking care of the cows, they could take a vacation for the first time in a while. I spent a week alone on the farm with five cows, milking them, caring for them, taking them out to pasture, and caring for the farm.

It was the first time in my life that I had been alone for seven days. I just saw one person, the mail carrier, in the distance one of those days. The farm was at the end of a road up that valley, so no one came by. Day by day, my mind got clear. I didn't stop thinking, but each thought—no matter whether good or bad—sparkled. I remember the things in the kitchen sparkled, and I felt such an intimacy with myself being alone that way, just settling in and not dealing with social dynamics.

Then, when my friends returned, I kind of lost that. I said, "Wow, this is quite something." I decided that my task was to learn how to be alone with others. What I meant by that intimacy, that sparkle, that way of being—I didn't want to be a hermit. I had to learn how to do this with people. That became a guide for my practice, a direction for my life for the next few years: how to be alone together with others. Here, "alone" was not lonely at all. It was this intimacy, presence, and peace that I felt.

It's kind of interesting that before I went to the farm, I was trying to see what was available for Buddhism in Norway in 1974 or 1975—I guess it would have been 1975 or 1976. I had a girlfriend there from northern Norway, and she said near where she went to high school, there was a fairly well-known Buddhist hermit living high in the mountains. He lived in the coldest place in Norway, far from the coast, halfway up.

I wrote him a letter and asked if I could come visit him, and he said yes. I sent my skis on a train and hitchhiked up to the little town where he was at. I remember it being so cold, and I didn't really have the right clothes for this. I had rain boots to be hitchhiking in, and they provided no insulation against the icy ground. Luckily, I got enough rides to get there before dark. I picked up my skis, carried them, and started walking up the mountain—just like the prototypical idea of going to the Himalayas and seeing a sage high in the mountains.

I climbed up above treeline, where he had two little cabins. He was 79 years old, and Einar Beer^[3] was his name. I spent two weeks with him, and I had a wonderful time. I don't know how much I meditated there, but I would go cross-country skiing in the morning high up in the mountains. The weather was spectacular for those two weeks: blue skies, sun, and this amazing snow. No one else had been skiing on the high mountains; I was all alone.

I would ski in the morning, come back and make lunch for both of us, and spend much of the afternoon talking with him. Mostly he wanted to talk about his old life. He had known Kaiser Bill^[4], the last Kaiser of Germany. He had seen Jiddu Krishnamurti^[5] when he came to Oslo in 1917. He had seen Rudolf Steiner^[6] there the same year. He had also been to New York at some point and saw the first [unintelligible] lights there. So it was fun to swap stories with him.

He told me stories of his spiritual teacher, a swami^[7] who had moved from India maybe around 1917 or 1918 and brought all his spiritual books with him to Norway. After some years, he decided to move into the deep mountains, and that's why Einar became his disciple. They went deep into these mountains.

At some point in the 1920s, this Hindu swami decided he was a reincarnation of the Buddha. That made Einar a Buddhist, though I don't know how much he knew about Buddhism. But he told me one amazing story.

The Germans had invaded Norway, and World War II was raging. This Indian swami decided he had to do something to stop the war. So he went into deep meditation, a kind of trance, and stopped eating for a long time. At some point, it was clear he was going to die from not eating. Einar said they thought he was not going to die without coming back one more time to give his last instructions. So he managed to get a few things that he knew the swami liked to drink and eat. One of them was vodka or whiskey, and the other was lettuce, which was unusual.

Einar was going to try to get those things. He went down the valley to where there was a telephone network where people would crank up and call the operator. He started cranking the phone, and as he was doing that, all these other people got on the phone, and they were all yelling, screaming, and celebrating.

Oh, there was another part of the story! Just before the Nazis came through that valley, the swami had Einar break up all the spiritual books and hide them in the basement behind these bricks. As Einar was going to take the last book and put it behind the wall to break it up, he opened it at random. It was a Buddhist book. It said, "When a Buddha is born, a Buddha is enlightened, or a Buddha dies, there are earthquakes." He closed the book, put it in the wall, and ripped it up.

So, he was down there, the swami was dying in his meditation state, and Einar went to call to get some more supplies. As he was cranking on this line, everyone was celebrating and screaming, and there were explosions and earthquakes all around. What was happening was that the Nazis had just surrendered, and they were blowing up the mines that were around, and people were celebrating.

But for Einar, he said he knew then that his teacher had passed away—that his consciousness had left his body. He'd done what he needed to do, which was to end the war.

I asked him, "Do you mean he died?"

And he said, "No, his body continued for a while longer, but his consciousness was already gone."

So that's a very unusual story about World War II, and very few people know that particular story, I suppose. There I was in the high mountains in January in Norway visiting this hermit and hearing lots of stories, and that was one of them.

From there, I went to live with my friends on their farm. I decided I wanted to be a farmer and buy a farm in Norway. But in order to buy a farm in Norway, you had to have an agricultural degree. I didn't know if I was going to be a farmer my whole life there in Norway. So I thought, rather than going to a vocational school in Norway, I'd go back to the University of California, Davis, for two more years and get an agricultural degree. Then I could be close to Zen Center, and I could go back to Norway when I was finished and buy a farm.

But then, at the end of that time in college, I got my degree in agriculture. Then I went to San Francisco Zen Center in 1978 and was there on and off for the next 15 years or so. I got sidetracked by Buddhism and I've never gone back to farm in Norway.

So, that was a little bit more of my life and stories. Thank you, and I'll continue tomorrow.