A week after I had the dream, it is still fresh in my mind, preceded by what triggers its most recent remembrance. In this case, the instigation was thinking, as I often do, of the Dylan Thomas line, "After the first death, there is no other." For the first time, I realized how shallow my understanding of it had always been. The line suddenly reminded me of my friend Ed Weiss and what he is always saying about God becoming His Creation. I thought, "The first death was God's when he became the Universe and it is the last and only one. There is nothing else but the Creation--and whatever form we take within it. We ARE wanted dead or alive." Since I had never thought anything like this before, I scrambled for coordinates, and instantly remembered my latest, almost-week-old dream about my guru, Bawa Muhiayaddeen. Bawa, I have realized, thanks to my friend Peggy Jo Donahue, is like an uncle or an aunt who raises a child with the kindness it never received from its biological parents. That 'angel' always returns when needed. Uncle Bawa is what Uncle Charley was to my father--an incarnate recurrence of the mercy these angels bring--even when, as sometimes happens, the angels rough us up. As I have grown older, mercy is more and more a modicum of wisdom and advice.
In Uncle Bawa's last dream/incarnation, he was taking questions during an evening discourse. I raised my hand and he recognized me, saying, "Don't tell me your question. Write it down on a piece of paper and I will guess it." So I wrote down my question on a piece of paper. As, or maybe just after, I did so, Bawa also wrote on a piece of paper, his scrawl instantly becoming visible on a big projection screen in the front of the room. His writing bore a perfect semblance to mine and the words were identical to those I had written: "What do I do now that I have dispensed with God?" Bawa then passed a piece of folded paper to me where was standing, in the back of the room. When I opened it, my question was written again, only this time in the Arial font I like to use when I am working on my computer. "This is amazing," I exclaimed. "It is the only way I can get you to accept me," he said with piqued weariness. "Now will you believe me?" I nodded an eager yes, and he said, "With you David, it is always the same thing--'What's next?' When will you ask, 'What's now'?"
It was then that I realized that how I identify myself--whether as believer or non-believer--mattered NOT (KNOT) at all. God was just a cumbersome and ill-advised code word for what Bawa called "the all of everything." It invited the very separation that is inimical to the intended holistic meaning of the word 'God'. Spinoza's God was inseparable from this world in which we feel stranded--a nickname of sorts, a tired synonym for unity broken by the every thought of a standoff or stand-alone creator-namesake. A creature of habit, I then thought of a Jack Spicer poem that always comes to mind when the day at hand becomes more important than any sense of it as container of time or a space intersected by the long distant-convergant railroad tracks of today's news and other events. "Your breath is meant to join this day. So join it," I heard Uncle Jack say. This is Uncle Jack's poem, first sent in 1964 when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh:
The Grail is as common as rats or seaweed
Not lost but misplaced.
Someone searching for a letter that he knows is around the house
And finding it, no better for the letter.
The grain-country damp now from a heavy rain
And growing pumpkins or artichokes or cabbage or whatever
they used to grow before they started worrying about the weather. Man
Has finally no place to go but upward: Galahad's
Testament.
--(Uncle) Jack Spicer, "The Holy Grail," The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1975, page 209.
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