“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” – Henry David Thoreau
When I was 14 or so, my father returned home one day to announce he would be working around the clock in the Pentagon for an unknown period of time because the country had quietly slipped into a higher state of nuclear readiness (the result of something or other the Soviets had done to make nuclear war more likely).
As he gathered his personal belongings my father advised me on what to do if I saw a brilliant fission of light over nearby Washington, D.C. “Stockpile canned foods in the bathroom and don’t forget the can opener!” “Fill the bathtub with drinking water since you’ll be in there for a couple of weeks.” “Line the door with wet towels to keep out radiation.” All of this presuming, as he put it, the notoriously inaccurate Soviet missiles didn’t in fact strike our suburban neighborhood and send our 11-story apartment building crashing to the ground or altogether incinerate it. And then he left.
That night, alone in our apartment, I lay in bed awaiting that artificial nuclear sunrise to the East and wondering: What the hell is wrong with the world? How did things get so screwed up that the humans sharing this tiny little orb in space were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at each other?
We shake our heads at a Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid drinking acolytes, but rarely stop to question the sanity of our own belief systems. Witness this poster I 
stumbled across the other day which, not to offend any Christian readers, IS more or less on target.
Kids are usually pretty good at seeing through these forms of madness, which is why so often we delight in their “innocence.” But with time and conditioning children merge into adulthood and the 14-year-old shaking his head at our nuclear insanity becomes a 44-year-old voting for a more rigid nuclear deterrent.
If we are fortunate, however, something upsets the apple cart sufficient enough to once again pull the veil from our eyes and force us to ask, “What the hell is going on? Why is the world like this and do I really want to march in step with it all?”
For me that moment arrived not simply in the form of extreme suffering but also a grim recognition that there didn’t seem to be any real way out of the cycle of suffering. I had invested years – decades – of my existence searching for something or someone to at last make sense of it all for me. Again and again I’d find the answer in the form of a belief system or a book, a movement or a personal regimen. And then would come another round of suffering or the suffering of a friend, or yet another media story about a child beaten to death by a lunatic parent. And once again that 14-year-old brain would briefly reawaken and ask, “WTF?”
All of which may help to explain why I wandered into a Utah canyon five years ago hellbent on finding a Truth that might transcend the usual mind-made garbage that contaminated me and the world. It had at last been seen that my mind – all human minds – are endlessly shifting and evolving, that there is no such thing as human truth because what’s true for me may not be for you and what’s true for me today no doubt will change 10 years from now. I realized that Jesus himself could return and in all likelihood we’d just ignore him or nail him to a tree again for the simple reason that each of us would filter what he did and said through our own mental noise and no doubt a great many would draw offense, grow angry and lash out.
Something must exist beyond this mind of mine – something that did not depend on centuries-old scripture, modern science, or the well-intentioned musings of friends, family and philosophers. Most important, it must be made known to ME, not shared with me or relayed to me by another. I would know the Truth or I would not know it at all.
Every great spiritual tradition speaks of a “still small voice within” that can be heard only when our own minds grow totally quiescent. To my way of thinking a Vision Quest was required because the modern world was racing in the opposite direction, filling our calendars, our senses, our minds with 24/7 noise that left us exhausted and empty and, ironically, feeling very much alone.
In the desert I prayed and I paced and I talked to God and I prayed some more. I laughed and ranted, I gave lectures to the sandstone monoliths towering above me, I befriended a juniper and a lizard, and I tried desperately to quiet my mind and listen. And of course the harder I tried the noisier my mind became, which may be why the Truth I’d been searching for didn’t emerge until, feeling despondent and hungry on my second evening and walking toward my prayer circle ‘it’ was simply there. The ‘it’ being what can only be described as an intelligence within and without, no me involved at all, my mind for that briefest of moments utterly blank. The message: “Know yourself and the rest will take care of itself.”
My mind roared to life. “What?! What was that? I want more of it, don’t go! What? WHAT?!?!?!” Nothing. A great joy filled me (still more mind-stuff that should have been discounted but hey, it felt good). That was the sum total of my four-day, four-night vision quest. Know myself.
Which made sense. Every spiritual tradition includes a clarion call to “know thyself.” Jesus purportedly said it was the only thing we humans had to do during our stay here, the rest is just time-filler.
But as I was to learn, these are dangerous waters because most seekers – myself included – become lost in the very mind that’s gone in search of itself. Like psychotherapy patients who spend years on the couch, we replay again and again our life story, mull over the dramas and triumphs and agonies, obsess about this ‘me’ who ostensibly is in search of itself. Trying to understand oneself becomes a full-time (and ultimately fruitless) job, akin to a wave trying to understand itself as part of the ocean.
