Swallowing the West River at a single gulp. A koan. I forget the source, the context, the teacher, whether the student is named or nameless, and what the question or issue actually was. Never mind.
            ‘East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.’ Was that our beloved imperialist, Rudyard? I believe so. Birth is a phase entirely of itself, says Dogen. Death is a phase entirely of itself. Therefore birth and death are distinct and not necessarily corollary. Birth begins and ends in birth, perhaps as a moment, but also as a full sphere, a cycle whose only common points are beginning and ending, although every moment of the cycle is a complete expression. That is, a cycle that cannot be predicated from moment to moment, a meandering cycle, a cycle filled with error (in the radical sense), and only ‘returning’ in terms of the sameness of birth as beginning and ending. The same is true of death.
            East and west.

             Actually, as I go along here, I think that the full statement was a direct response to a question: ‘I will tell you when you swallow the West River at a single gulp.’ But I still don’t remember the question. And I still say, never mind.

            Because my own awareness began in an overwhelming compulsiveness of shame and guilt, a self-awareness embedded in confusion and self-accusation and compulsive recrimination, the history is filled with uncontrollable reactive responses, strange, violent and often savage acts beyond any purview of conscious control and arising from a basic context of mania. Occasionally, one has a window of peace, an archetypal moment of awareness that later proves to embody prophetic value. But otherwise life has the quality of a fire in crumpled paper.
            Naturally, then, one begins to believe in a kind of formal redemption of time, that a day will arrive in which one will be able to rectify the past, go back and correct all the errors – particularly as one gradually gains control over his life, begins to string the moments of peace together and find a continuous handle on his own volition, begins to find the procedures and principles by which to break down the compulsive loops of shame and guilt and break through the obsessive stranglehold of memory itself.
            But, today, I find that this hope itself has become the impediment. Because one has attached this rectifying tag to so many memories, has been able to evade the compulsions and obsessions of the past by pledging to correct that moment at some time in the future, return to the scene of the crime and change the context or relationship by a present act or word, the memory of these pledges themselves has become the burden, in part as pledges, but in part because they now sustain the negative element in the memories themselves.
            At some point one has to accept the memory just as it was. The pledges are good. They have had their place in the curative activity of time and the work, the sadhana. But now they are the force that clogs the moment. Behind those pledges, the demons can still arise, the shaming nature of the memories they temporarily held at bay.

             California has become my Ireland. From the fall of Rome, Ireland and England became the mirroring emblems of the ‘other world’. For the English to travel to Ireland or the Irish to travel to England became the journey to the ‘other side’. And I suppose I am more English than Irish, at least in cultural ancestry. I may be more Irish by blood, although the geneticists now tell us that that is likely meaningless. So from my medieval England here in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the ‘right coast’, as they say nowadays, I look out at my ‘left coast’ of California, the Ireland of my ‘other world’. In ’72 – ’73, I spent the year in an ashram in California, from the beginning of summer to the beginning of summer. I have already spoken here of my relationship with the teacher, of the ambiguities and frustrations, the basic failure, at some level, in defiance of the ultimate, if isolated, success. But the moment was the pivot. The substantive content of his teaching was probably as much if not more of the cause that I now view the experience as the axis. Hidden in Upanishad is a description of the moment of experience that turns the world. But, as a consequence, California became a capsule for the struggle, the residual obsessions and compulsions at war with the ‘new man’, so to speak, the new / old man – spiritually, the old crone who sees her face in the ancient mirror.
            A brief journey, then, to the other world, where one finds the pivot of realization that brings the nature of the struggle into focus, raises both positive and negative into the arena of principle – sets the sacred circle and the sacrificial post in the midst of the suffering world, and draws in demons as well as beneficent spirits. One returns with the sacred implements, and like the head of Bran and his surviving cohorts, as long as we face west, eighty years seems but a moment of time. That is, the dream persists, and one presumes that the day of realization is a day of rectification, not in terms of the here and now, but in terms of the past hour as well, that one can return to the hour and change and rectify. So California or Ireland becomes the freedom of the past as well as the present.

             I have not returned to California since. But the unperceived desire retained a thread, a promise, a hope that I could return to what was. But now I see a picture of San Francisco, a density of high-rise buildings totally alien to anything I remember of the peculiarly quiet low-rise city of my perceptions, the westward gaze that holds eternity and moment in an endless turret of suspended change, and the illusion falls away. The tower crumbles. The whole sea of suffering rolls back inward, into the sanctuary, the safe circle. But now I can accost demon, dragon and the children of realization together. Memory washes back, day by day. But today, I am only here, standing on my hind feet. And what washes over me is illusion, the illusion of loss, the illusion of salvation. Today I can see with my own eye and act with my own hand. Neither history nor demon has power apart from where I stand.
            Today, I swallow the whole of the West River in a single gulp.