When I was around eleven or twelve years old or so I spent two summers living lightly on the land like a forest monk on the east side of the High Sierras under the auspices of my Uncle. During one of those summers, on return to our main camp after having being gone several days and driving up to Whitney Portal followed by a climb to the summit, my uncle and I stopped at the compound of a man of deep spiritual Attainment that he knew in some fashion by the name of Franklin Merrell-Wolff --- an introduction that I woefully admit meant nothing to me at the time or for years to come. As the slow series of events unfolded I had no surface understanding that the meeting was actually almost a mirror image of an earlier encounter under completely different yet still similar circumstances --- opening a window to things to come through a door from the past.[1]
After a brief introduction, Merrell-Wolff took my hand and the the two of us walked slowly a few steps alone along an uneven rock strewn path, stopping only when we came upon a sweeping vista of the full extent of the mountains before us. Waving his hand in the air across the top of the peaks he told me there were trees on the mountains a thousand years old and in the sky above, stars millions of years old. He then said I was not yet twelve, nowhere near the age of the ancient trees or the stars, but we were ALL made of the samething with the same thought. It was as though someone had unexpectedly dumped a 55 gallon drum of ice cold water on me from behind. A feeling rushed over me if only for an instant but seemingly for an eternity, scaring me so much I ran back down the the rough, heavily strewn rocky path as fast as I thought I was able. However, my forward momentum was even faster --- as if I was gliding, my feet seemingly not making any real contact with the ground, almost as though the wind was carrying me and in the process I was part of the wind and the path as well --- blowing me right into the arms of my uncle, all the while still shaking and shivering all over.[2]
My uncle held me tight for the longest time. Then, sending me off with the other kids so I would not be within earshot but maintaining an ever watchful eye, he and Wolff sat and talked a long while. When they were done my uncle stood up, shook Merrell-Wolff's hand, thanked him, and we headed back to the car. All that time and for hours on end everything seemed as though I was looking through a 3-D viewer. Sounds carried a clarity I never remembered, and smells and odors waifted through my nostrils like never before --- I could even smell my own armpits. When we arrived at camp I was tired and wasted and fell asleep for what seemed like forever. When I awoke the sensations were gone.[3]
As far as Merrell-Wolff and my uncle are concerned it is not totally clear how the two of them met or knew each other in the first place. It was, however, I think, put into place initially through an early loose-knit association with my father that had long since faded.
Somewhere in my writings I tell how my father was fascinated with the Lost Dutchman Mine, primarily because he had spent a great deal of time as a gold prospector in his youth. Sometime prior to or during the Depression my father along with a man with the first name of "King" and another man whose name I don't recall, had gone to the gold fields of the Sierras to pan for gold, eventually setting up a full-fledged claim with sluce boxes and all. Merrell-Wolff was a gold prospector as well and it was during that time he and my father crossed paths. I am sure it was through that connection my uncle and Merrell-Wolff came to know each other.[4]
After my mother died my dad was married several times, became a heavy drinker and smoked packs and packs of cigaretts a day. My uncle was much more spiritual and, even though my dad and Merrell-Wolff may have been friends at one time, my uncle and he had a much closer kinship.
At the time of the incident at the Merrell-Wolff compound I was traveling with my uncle, my two brothers, a cousin, a boy around my age somehow related to my stepmother by the name of Richard and a kid we called Bub President Hudson who was the son of some actress my dad knew and that went on-and-on continuously all day and night telling us that his mom was a spy and that she went to school with Tarzan. Interestingly enough, out of us all, I was the ONLY ONE Merrell-Wolff chose to guide along the path that day.
As a young boy with no insight or knowledge into such things, although it was an uncanny experience for me, the incident soon passed from my thoughts. Carrying much more import at the time was the fact that my then stepmother visited the main camp area for a few days. She was a beautiful woman with her hair swept up in the late 1940s fashion, sporting open toed heels and bright red nails. An unusual sight in any campground.
One afternoon she pointed out a lone tree standing all by itself on the side of the mountain across the valley above the tree line. I had noticed the same tree many times and when she stated she was going to climb up there one day and water it. Thinking the tree might be a thousand years old and wondering how it ever got water in the first place, the idea intrigued me.
She never did climb up to the tree, but after she left, the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. None of my brothers or others in the camp were interested nor up to it, so early one morning before sunrise I started out alone.
Just below the mountain I filled a five gallon jeep can with as much water as I could carry from the stream that fed the lakes, tied a rope on the can and dragged it up the mountain. By late mid-morning or so I reached the lonely tree tired and exhausted. My fatique was soon forgotten as the view of the valley was fantastic. I understood why the tree located itself there. I dug a circular ditch around the base of the trunk, then slowly poured water into it. The water gurgled for a while, foamed brown a little, then sank into the soil.
Then, just as I was about to sit down it came to me the base of the tree was all mud. My intention was to sit and lean against the tree in the shade and take in the view. Instead the ground around the trunk was soggy and wet...so I layed a short distance away from the tree in the shade cast, looking toward the clear blue sky and the occasional wistful cloud floating by, the sky dotted here and there by the graceful glide of my unknown to me and one-day-to-come Totem Animal, the giant wingspan condor-like Turkey Vulture slipping effortlessly on the rising Sierra thermals.
(click image)
There I was miles from camp having hauled fifty pounds of water up the side of a mountain for the roots of a tree that was doing quite well by itself and had been for years, thank you very much, and I saved no water for myself nor had I thought of bringing food. My only thought when I left camp was giving water to the tree. When I brought the gift, after pouring it, I couldn't even lean against the tree or feel it's touch. True, I shared it's shade, but not it's touch. In the end I walked back down the mountain alone, hungry and thristy for not having done more. When I arrived back in camp late in the afternoon my brothers and the others were playing and swimming in the creek. Except for my Uncle no one had realized I was even gone.
That which is me that people recall will cease to exist in it's present form one day, returning to the broader mix for other things in the universe to use...maybe even as part of an offspring of that tree on the side of that mountain. That would be nice.
SEE:
HIGH MOUNTAIN ZENDO
DOING HARD TIME IN A ZEN MONASTERY
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
(PLEASE CLICK)
AWAKENED TEACHERS FORUM
ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL
GASSHO
HIKING AND MEDITATION
ALONG METEOR CRATER
RIM
CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT
ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE
SEE ALSO:
FRANKLIN MERRELL-WOLFF
SEE AS WELL:
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE RAZOR'S EDGE
HOW THE BIRCH TREE GOT ITS CLAW MARKS
ZEPPELINS
VISIT THE
DREAM
CATCHER
SITE
THUNDERBIRD
SITE LIST
FOOTNOTE [1]
There is a slight caveat attached to the following quote as presented in the above text:
"As the slow series of events unfolded I had no surface understanding that the meeting was actually almost a mirror image of an earlier encounter under completely different yet still similar circumstances --- opening a window to things to come through a door from the past."
Such is not totally the case, primarily because of extenuating circumstances. Those extenuating circumstances or caveat as I have chosen to call it, are too long to go into here, but an inkling toward said circumstances is given first in THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana only to be explained in full at:
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
It should be noted that Adam Osborne, who, as a young boy grew up at the Ramana Ashram and the son of one of the foremost Ramana biographers Arthur Osborne, played a prominent role in the Last American Darshan as linked above.
FOOTNOTE [2]
I am always reminded of a similar running event like the one that happened to me while I was visiting Merrill-Wolff's, but observed by an explorer named Alexandra David-Neel who spent 14 years in Tibet. She reports that while traveling high in the mountains of the Himalayas she saw a man moving with extraordinary speed and described the event as follows:
"I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball, and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum." (source)
FOOTNOTE [4]
My uncle's mother was a Quaker. Even though he was raised in the religion he never followed it nor practiced it. However, through her practice of the religion his mother met and knew a woman by the name of Gretchen Green. Green was a nurse who just so happened went to India and opened, then ran, a health clinic for a major Indian personage by the name of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore's father was a Maharshi and Tagore himself was an artist and international renowned poet, Tagore having received the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature in 1913.
In October of 1930 Tagore was in the United States doing educational fundraising and exhibiting his artwork, with shows in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Through the long standing connection between my uncle's mother and the nurse Gretchen Green, a steadfast healthcare professional who Tagore had an exceptionally high opinion of, my uncle was able to finagle an introduction --- an introduction that turned out to be much more destiny filled than just a mere passing handshake in a crowded, cold gallery.
Tagore traveled in all the right circles, writers, artist, politicians, mystics, gurus. Among others he met Shunyata who, in 1974, I met as well. Equally interesting, during his 1930 visit, Tagore appeared on stage with the interpretive dancer Ruth St. Denis at the Broadway Theater in New York City. Inturn, twenty-four years later, it was St. Denis who, in 1954, introduced me to Swami Ramdas.
Although Tagore was not an Enlightened being nor did he present himself as such, he did play to the hilt the Indian side of things by strongly portraying himself as a mystic poet and philosopher --- which in all reality, he was. There was something soothing or mystic-like about him my uncle sensed while in his presence. In the process my uncle was taken by Tagore and, for awhile, immersed himself into Indian religious thought.
For my uncle, raised in a Quaker tradition, eastern spiritual thought seemed so open and exotic. About ten years before meeting Tagore the groundwork for things spiritual on the eastern side of things had been set into motion, generously, in an odd sort of way, opening the door for a much more receptive attitude by my uncle when Tagore came along.
From my uncle's early post high school years through to the end of the depression he was a struggling artist. He did everything he could to earn a few bucks as long as it was art related. In the early 1920s he took a job doing minor art resoration for Edward I. Farmer. Farmer was an art dealer in New York City with upscale galleries at both 5 West Fifty-sixth Street and 16 East Fifty-sixth Street. He offered a variety of Chinese works of Art as well as European antiques. He is remembered for the most part for mounting fine Chinese porcelains and jades into decorative lamps and desk accessories. While my uncle was working in the gallery studios he met a Japanese man by the name of Yeita Sasaki that was sculpting jade for Farmer. Sasaki, who at the time was a formost Zen adept and one of the first major Zen Buddhists in America, would, in 1928, become a full-fledged Zen master known as Sokei-an, receiving Inka Shomei from his teacher Sokatsu Shaku.
Sokei-an was an advocate of "direct transmission," as was his student and follower Mary Farkas. If you have gone to my page on Alfred Pulyan you may recall he too was an advocate of "direct transmission." You may also recall that Pulyan's mysterious female teacher, the person most responsible for his transformation, was a friend of Farkas. About "direct transmission," Sokei-an, in his own words, says:
"I am of the Zen sect. My special profession is to train students of Buddhism by the Zen method. Nowadays, there are many types of Zen teachers. One type, for example, teaches Zen through philosophical discourse; another, through so-called meditation; and still another direct from soul to soul. My way of teaching is the direct transmission of Zen from soul to soul."
Years later, because of a still lingering sub-surface lean toward Zen Buddhism and Indian philosophy-religion, and knowing I had been to India and returned in a somewhat can't quite put your finger on it altered state, it is my belief that my uncle talked with my father about his concerns, putting an India type philosophic-like spin on things. In the process he must have informed my dad that he had taken me to see Paramahansa Yogananda at his Self-Realization Fellowship near San Diego. My father never heard of Yogananda, but it just so happened he knew Franklin Merrell-Wolff, the two of them having met when they were both gold prospectors together in the old days. Talking with my uncle my dad remembered that Merrell-Wolff had some sort of a spiritual epiphany. Knowing him both before and after that epiphany, and remembering after that Merrell-Wolff exhibited similar --- as my father called them, fucked up tendencies --- he sent me and my uncle to see him.
Although not directly related to the above Merrell-Wolff meeting per se' the following is related in a sort of offhand way:
About four years after the meeting with Merrell-Wolff my uncle took me to meet Albert Einstein. It is my belief that it was through his friendship with Tagore that my uncle was able to set meeting. In July of 1930, about four months before my uncle met Tagore, Tagore Interviewed Einstein. It is thought, by extrapolating inferences over time from my uncle, that it was through the Tagore-Einstein connection the initial meeting between my uncle and Einstein unfolded which inturn set the stage for the meeting between the scientist and myself.
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UFO OVER L.A.: THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES
