The life of the Buddha tells how after many years of intense spiritual practice he, sat down to meditate, determined not to get up until he had become fully enlightened.  During this last night he faced his most difficult trials. It was a struggle with ignorance and fear, no holds barred.

Mara, the lord of illusion, tried to seduce him with pleasures, sending his daughters of more than earthly beauty, promising unimagined delights.   When they failed to break his concentration, he sent an army of demons, brandishing every kind of weapon, each more terrifying than the last. The Buddha dismissed them. 

In the last temptation Mara put the question to him, “who do you think you are? Who are you to become enlightened?”

To overcome this last temptation, the Buddha did not call upon spiritual practice; he touched the earth acknowledging that he, like Mara, and every other thing, was part of the basic goodness of the world. This was his answer to the question, “who do you think you are?” He was part of the web of life, not separate, and therefore he could attain happiness. The voice of the earth rang out to acknowledge him. He was free.

He began this final night of meditation after years of ascetic practice. But this had taken him to the threshold, but not through the door. On this night he was determined to pass through and when Lord Mara asked his question, he remembered a moment from early childhood, when he was placed in his cradle under a tree with a bright blue summer sky overhead. He recalled that child’s first awareness of the sound and smells of a late summer afternoon. There was nothing but sky, the smell of the fields, the song of birds and buzzing insects.  A small wasp landed on his forehead, and he felt with curiosity and delight the six tiny feet cross his brow.   That is what provided his answer to Lord Mara.

This third temptation of the Buddha is the one that always gets to me.  -I don’t think that I am truly afraid of many things.  Death scares me only a little, although there are still many things I want to experience.  And I am not really beguiled by shiny objects, fast cars (or fast women). I can see their limitations.  But the blade that comes near to nicking my heart is self-doubt and a pseudo masculine need to establish mastery of life and of myself.  I hear that smooth quiet voice of Mara, “Who do you think you are?”

And then it is easy to begin to believe that I will never be good enough and I must strive more. Which is followed by a guilty need for comfort, a holiday, something sweet, a shiny object. Then I need to strive more, try harder, learn more, work harder, meditate more…. When I fail in my duties, when I eat too much, spend too much, drink too much, it is usually not because of their appeal. – I hear Mara, asking “who do you think you are?” –And then I want to go home, shut my door, sulk, eat, drink, buy things I don’t need. I want to let go of whatever wisdom I have attained and declare myself a hopeless case. And after that I want to embark on a project of self-reclamation.

And most particularly I do not want to notice the effects of light, walking in the woods at sunset. I do not want to take my boat out in the early morning watching the great blue herons along the shore, as together we inhabit a mirrored stillness. I don’t want to notice, much less be enraptured by a small girl dancing in her own shadow on the shore of the river, nor the smell of new mown grass.  I don’t want to touch the breasts of my wife; I don’t want to see her open face. It burns, it flays off my skin. “Who do I think I am?” Well I am a scoundrel, a poseur. I am Ishmael.  I am both sinner and the angel judge who stands with flaming sword to keep me out of Eden. And in this painful exile some comforts are needed. What of it? I am doomed and therefore deserve to enjoy myself. None of it matters anyway.

However it came about, womenfolk came to represent in some dark corner of my own mind and in the mind and heart of our civilization itself, the principle of the earth. The connections we form when we love, when we notice beautiful things, when we live here and now in our senses have become the province of women.

And thus, as a young man, in order to be initiated into humanity, I had to learn to see and fully respond to the world from the mentorship of women

 Who do I think I am? I am lover, husband, father, observer of God’s many magic tricks of light and beauty. – I heard once how a famous violinist stood in a subway entrance with his Stradivarius violin, playing his music, which people paid $200 a night to hear. Almost no one stopped or tossed a coin in his hat.  –I think that is how God feels. She stands in the shadows, creating the music of time and no one notices.

Much of the time, if we men feel anything, it is lust or greed.  And the world begins to seem sad, and that we can never have enough.  We fear death and long for it. That voice comes in the night, “who do you think you are?”

It is from women that I learned how to touch the earth. And this knowledge carries me when I begin, from time to time to be afraid, doubt my own goodness and that of the world.

I have learned to go for a long walk in a forest place, or go down to the shore and watch children play in the water, or their older sisters, proud and shy of their young bodies trying to be noticed while not seeming to, and the young men running along the path, proud and shy of their bodies, trying to pretend they are not noticing.  I touch the ground as witness. And then I go home to my lover, prepare a good dinner, talk a bit about nothing in particular, and we see where things go from there.

Most of us have a complicated relationship to pleasure. For an animal, the pleasure-pain calculus is straightforward. Animals seek pleasure and avoid pain; the aim is to obtain the greatest pleasure with the least pain.

Humans also avoid pain and seek pleasure. But there is something in the experience of pleasure which animals don’t have. For humans the deeper and more intense kinds involve what the Greeks called ekstatsis, being beside oneself, united with the thing experienced. This loss of our selves to beauty, to a lover, or to God, is something we crave and fear.  Not all pleasure calls this up; Ice cream, summer movies, or a hot bath are unproblematic. But there are some kinds of experience such as love, music, or art, forests, mountains, or mystical states which breach the boundaries between your self and the world. People speak of being “transported” (where they could not say) and the boundaries of skin and self become permeable.

When Sleepers Awaken

I am reminded of Sleeping Beauty.  The real story begins at the kiss. Year by year the sleeper is awakened more fully to her body, to her own particular mind. She comes to fully inhabit time. And when the prince looks on her life without flinching, taking in her fears, her longings and the frail reed of her body, he comes to realize that he was also a sleep walker and in that kiss a secret which his imagination could not have predicted was revealed: he could not belong only to himself.   Then the real love affair begins.

The Final Entry of Don Juan’s Private Journal

On a summer night too hot for sleep. I got up from my bed and walked the courtyard while Maria lay in the room above. The new one was in a small bed next to ours. There was an odd sense of stillness, though in late summer the night is never quiet. The tips of the branches against the milky clouds seemed to be listening- There was the relentless bleat of the night insects- Their repetition was like the drumbeat of desire. Strangely enough the image of Maria’s breasts, full of milk, came to my mind. But there is nothing I wanted from her. She would have accommodated me if I had asked it. But the she needed sleep. And there was nothing I wanted to do, though I felt it in my loins. Strange indeed, there can be desire, but nothing desired.

 She, like me, is on the way to a place unknown. I seek to enter her heart, her body with delight. And compassion- There is throbbing like the insect cries. I feel its urgency in my bones, and yet there is some thing else. After all of these years, all the lovers, I still do not know how to name it. In bed I have become a listener, intent like a sibyl. Intoxicated I hear voices and speak out mysteries whose meaning I don’t understand.

The biblical phrase “carnal knowledge” is a curious one. Does one ever have knowledge? It is as if we were God’s alphabet with no more awareness of the text we form than the letters on a printed page know its meaning.

Strip off, strip down. Close, with her (and be encountered).  The Angel Jacob wrestled with was female.  And the contest came to this: “will you at last cry out, ‘I do not know the world.’”

Thoughts About Love- A Commonplace Book

• Skin is the boundary between Soul and the world. The shape of skin does not seem to matter.
• Wife: mother, lover, gate of life, time, death.  I now see her folds and contours lose tautness.  I recall the mixture of feelings I have toward my own aging body; the impulses I still do not completely understand. and I feel tenderness.  My restless mind wants to fix on one or some of her qualities so that I can say I have found who she is. – But it is beyond understanding.
•  It is a strange fact that the gesture which gives her pleasure does the same for me, implying a kind of intermingling of our souls. Human beings look at their sex as something, curious, humorous, questioning, anguished… No animal does this. -Ovid was right, erotic experience involves a metamorphosis— a beast, a flower, a clear pool. Something more and less than human is involved.