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Dharmette: Gil Stories (1 of 5) Pre-Buddhism

Hello my friends, and welcome to Monday, the beginning of a new series. As some of you might know, I've been teaching a lot the last couple of months. The month of September I was teaching almost every day. And then this last week, I was teaching up in the Sierras for an Eco-Chaplaincy retreat.

I feel like I've been teaching a lot, so the idea of sitting here and teaching something Buddhist like I usually do doesn't quite seem to be in my heart. I like to live what I teach, and so I'm kind of full of doing teaching for the moment, or empty of doing teachings. So hopefully, that is okay for you all.

I'd like to do something that's easy for me, and that is to tell you some stories, some practice stories, some of that practice background. I'll do it a little bit chronologically over the week. Today, I thought I would start with a little bit of the background that I think about when I consider coming into Buddhist practice.

It won't be the full background, but what's alive for me is not all the challenges that brought me, but rather all the goodness that brought me. The different ways in which I tapped into something healthy, good, and supportive, sometimes without even knowing it until later. I don't know if it set my course in the direction of Buddhist practice, but certainly, by the time I encountered Buddhism, this was part of the support system inside of me that helped me with the struggles of the early years of practice—the suffering, the difficulties I had. There was also this amazing support within, of maybe how I was prepared for it.

When I think back about that support system, I think about how I was born in Norway to Norwegian parents. Norwegians are known for being seafaring folks, so the Vikings are maybe some kind of representation of that. I spent a lot of time early in life on the water, in the fjords of Norway and different places in the world. There was something about being on the water, especially early in the morning before the wind started up, when the water was completely still and quiet. Being up on the deck of a boat and sitting there quietly, just feeling the stillness and the peace—then everything was good in the world. Somehow, I ingested and took in some of that peace and stillness. I think it shaped me to some degree, or became a reference for me.

Another, very different kind of reference for peace happened when I was eighteen and driving alone around Europe. I was meeting people, picking people up, and sleeping in hostels, parks, the woods—sleeping here and there. I didn't have much money.

I came to Mont-Saint-Michel. It's a big Catholic monastery and cathedral on this little island off the coast of Normandy in northwest France, where there's a big tide difference. When the high tide is in, except for a bridge going onto the island, it's an island. And when the tide goes out, it's mud all the way out to the island. It looks a little bit like a Disney castle. You're driving along and suddenly it appears on this high mound, this little island, and then this cathedral-like spire comes up out of the middle.

I went there and looked for a place to stay. In this town back then, they had a small, hole-in-the-wall Catholic hostel run by Pax, some kind of organization for peace.^[2] There was a single priest in there who took care of it, and I don't know how many people could stay there—six, eight, or something. We'd have meals around this big wooden table with the priest, and at some point, he took me for a walk and we had a wonderful talk. It was the first time in my life I had talked with a priest.

Then I walked by myself to have a tour of the whole monastery with a group of other people. They took us to the top of the hill around which this huge cathedral or monastery was built. There was the original one-room stone chapel that had been built maybe a thousand years before, or more. As we walked into that chapel, something inside of me just settled and became peaceful. It was almost like I stepped into a presence of peace that I'd never experienced before. I tried to linger in that chapel as long as I could, even as the group was leaving, just to take in this phenomenal capacity for peace and well-being. That became a reference point for me, and maybe part of the reason I started having thoughts about becoming a Catholic monk. I wondered if they'd take me as an atheist! There was something about that life, and the feeling in that life, that became very attractive to me.

Over the next year back in college, I got initiated into TM, Transcendental Meditation. I really liked it, but mostly it made me calm. It wasn't a profound thing to do, but I loved the calm. That was good for about two months, and then there was summer vacation, and I just kind of forgot about it.

But the summer vacation was back on a boat. I sailed across the Atlantic on a sailboat as part of the crew. I got on the boat in Malta, in the middle of the Mediterranean, and we sailed to Barbados in the Caribbean. It was a wonderful trip. We made almost record time because we had been delayed and were sailing during the hurricane season. We didn't encounter any hurricanes ourselves, but it meant the wind was actually quite good.

There was something about being on the boat hour after hour—say, six hours a day at the helm in two-hour shifts. Being up in the middle of the night from 2:00 to 4:00 AM, the only person on deck, with the amazing stars in the middle of the Atlantic. There was an amazing sense of harmony, an amazing sense of peace. But the thing that happened on that sailing trip that made a big difference when, about a year later, I started doing Zen practice, was this: I had decided at the beginning of the trip that it was fine to have a fantasy life. I didn't have to censor whatever was going on in my mind.

When I was standing there at the helm for two hours, that was a time to let my mind wander. But every half a second, almost, you had to be tending to the boat—adjusting the rudder slightly, tracking the sails, looking at the compass, understanding the big waves that were coming that we had to navigate. The waves were big, so you had to be aware of what was happening all the time. This combination of allowing myself the freedom to fantasize and think, but every half second or so being grounded in the present, was really freeing for me. By the end of this trip across the Atlantic, I was living in a kind of ecstasy, a kind of joy. It taught me so much about how to be present.

When I started doing Zen meditation, I had the same idea: to give freedom to my mind, not to try to control my thoughts, but at the same time, every half second, keep being here. Keep being here with the breath. That way I wouldn't wander off in thoughts, but I also didn't try to stop my thoughts. That combination was very meaningful for me and gave me a sense of how to do Zen. There was so little instruction—we were told to be with the breath, but more than that, there wasn't much else being taught.

But the one more thing that happened before I came to the Zen Center and started my Buddhist practice also changed me quite a bit. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up an atheist, and even though I was attracted to monastic life, I didn't like religion. I didn't trust it and certainly didn't want to consider myself religious. I didn't know if I could be a monk and not be religious, let alone an atheist! I wasn't interested in spirituality. The word spiritual wasn't a word I was going to utter.

Then I was traveling across the United States. I had dropped out of college by then, and somehow I ended up on the largest commune in the United States back then, a place called The Farm.^[3] There were about 700 people there, mostly hippies. Before I got there, they had taken a lot of LSD, so it was kind of their religious sacrament. But they had bought a farm in Tennessee, and the leaders of the commune had been arrested for marijuana use. They realized they couldn't be using drugs anymore in Tennessee, so they decided to use the next best sacrament to LSD, and that was honesty.

When I got there, I was blown away to be around people who had such expertise in being honest. I was struck by how quickly they talked about tension, and how much they worked on trying to resolve the conflicts and tensions that existed there. They were all trying to be honest with what was going on. I was so inspired by this. They considered themselves spiritual, and I said, well, if this is what spiritual is, I'm into this. This is really good.

At The Farm, the bible that just about everyone was reading was the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.^[4] That book spoke to me. I was so surprised to read it and get a sense that I understood what was being said. Not only did I understand it, but the book was mirroring back to me things that I already knew, but didn't know I knew. That was the feeling: "Well, I know this, but I didn't know." I was so inspired by this, and sitting Zen meditation was a big part of the book. So, when I left The Farm in Tennessee, one of the first places I went to check out was the San Francisco Zen Center, because of that book and how much it had moved me to be there.

That's when I began my Buddhist practice—first haltingly, and then some years later consistently, until the present. Hopefully, that's nice for you to hear. We'll continue this journey over this week. Hopefully, it's nice for you to hear this background around me, and it also gives me a little bit of a break from the usual kind of teaching. Thank you.