[Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Lew Welch are from Ring of Bone, his collected poems, first published in 1973, re-published with additions in 2012. The poem “Wobbly Rock, which appears in that collection, was published separately in 1960.]
I: Perceptual Buddhism
My one mentor in the art of poetry and my first real spiritual teacher was Beat Generation poet Lew Welch, who died an alcoholic suicide at the age of 44. As a practitioner of what Alan Watts called “Beat Zen” he went a long way, in my opinion, toward founding an entirely new school of Buddhist practice, which I have named “perceptual Buddhism,” a method designed to train a person to see the world as a Buddha would see it, thus helping him or her take a real step toward the attainment of samyak sambodhi, Perfect Total Enlightenment. In addition to this—in his later years, as the scheduled date of his suicide drew ever closer—he also explored the world of shamanism, specifically the not entirely kosher shamanism of Carlos Castaneda, an interest that resulted in the foundation of his personal “Buzzard Cult,” which I’ll describe in detail below. As for his perceptual Buddhism, to give you an idea of the significance of this achievement I’ll attempt to explain things not in terms of Zen but rather from the point of view of vipassana or mindfulness meditation, one of the central methods of the earliest school of Buddhism, the Theravada.
At the basis of vipassana are what are known as “the Four Foundations of Mindfulness”: mindfulness of body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of mind, and mindfulness of mind-contents. According to my own understanding of these foundations, which is similar but not entirely identical to the traditional account, “body” includes the posture and motions of one’s body along with the various visceral sensations; “feeling” is the whole realm of the emotions, of whatever quality, positive or negative, stretching from the sense of the emotionally-charged vital energies at the lower border to the most subtle spiritual raptures at the higher one; “mind” covers the basic quality of your present consciousness, the essential “set” or belief-system through which you view your experience; “mind contents” is made up of the words and images that are constantly flowing through that mind. If you are capable of witnessing the entire field of these four foundations without editing or identifying with any part of them—since to identify with anything, to make it part of your identity, is to become unconscious of it—then the “witness,” the sense that “here I am having this experience,” disappears, until only the bare attention, the witnessing itself, remains. This is the vipassana approach to transcending or annihilating the ego.
Nonetheless something is still missing in this scheme; the four foundations of mindfulness do not in fact cover the entire field of what is there for us to be mindful of. What exactly is missing? What’s missing is the world, the information constantly streaming in through the five senses. And because the world is not included in the four foundations but remains unconscious, the ego still has a place to hide itself; the shadow of identification, the shadow of the self-invented witness, peering out through its keyhole “at” reality, still remains. That’s what happens, that’s the limitation you face, when you meditate with your eyes closed.
What Lew Welch did through his “perceptual Buddhism” (in my opinion) was fill in this gap, by the simple yet supremely difficult act of including the “outside” world in the field of mindfulness. The Zen Buddhists in their “haiku” aesthetic, in the koans of the Rinzai Sect, in flower arranging, in brush painting, in the tea ceremony, and in the Sino-Japanese martial arts tradition, had begun the process of deliberately including the world in the field of reality—but Lew, especially in one of his perception-exercises, as well as in two of his riddles, “The Riddle of Bowing” and “The Riddle of Hands,” definitely advanced this development, making it even more deliberate and explicit.
The answers to “The Riddle of Bowing,” and “The Riddle of Hands” are entirely concrete; whoever is able to solve them will need to have overcome the “philosopher disease,” the attachment to conceptual thought that the koans of Rinzai Zen are designed to conquer. The solutions to these riddles are not ideas; they are nothing that the world of words could conceive of or understand, consequently nobody affected by the philosopher disease will be able to solve them. I’m leaving out Lew’s third riddle here, “The Rider Riddle,” because it leads somewhere else, toward shamanism; it’s basically a way of finding your spirit helper or “ally” or totem animal. (I’ll get back to this riddle when the time comes, below, to tell to the story of Lew’s death and “continuance.”) But the other two are more like koans. They can’t be figured out by thinking about them; the only way to solve them is to let go of all philosophical and symbolic thinking, and make your mind as concrete as possible. Lew says about them: “They are Koans for beginners, making no claim for Perfect Enlightenment, but those who solve them will discover a deep spiritual insight.” Unlike true koans, however, they have explicit answers that can be told—but shouldn’t; they should only be confirmed (or not). Both “The Riddle of Bowing” and “The Riddle of Hands” have only one right answer.
As an introduction to these I’ll give you the riddle from one of Lew’s major poems, “Wobbly Rock,” along with its correct solution, just to show you what I mean by “concrete,” and to introduce that riddle I need to quote that poem to the effect that Wobbly Rock is “a real rock/ (believe this first)/ resting on actual sand at the surf’s edge:/ Muir Beach, California….Hard common stone/ Size of the largest haystack/ It moves when hit by waves/ Actually shudders.” Lew used to sit on that rock to meditate; it has a precisely square little step or cleft on it that makes a perfect meditation seat (half lotus). I’ve meditated there myself. Imagine how sitting in meditation on a huge boulder that rocks back and forth as the waves strike it—k-CHUNK, k-CHUNK—could teach, in a completely visceral, non-conceptual way, the Buddhist principles of universal anitya—Impermanence—and universal shunyata—Emptiness.And, paradoxically, you can only realize the anitya part of it, universal motion, if you become perfectly still—if, as Lew puts it in the poem, you “sit real still and keep your mouth shut.”
Here’s the riddle:
Dychymig Dychymig: (riddle me a riddle)
Waves and the sea. If you
take away the sea
Tell me what it is
This riddle brings together two (not unrelated) things that Lew liked to do: play with language, and point to the world beyond language, the real world. The solution is: If you take away “the sea” from “Waves and the sea,” you get “Waves and,” which, to the ear, is also “wave-sand.” So the solution is something that anyone who has seen a sandy ocean beach has seen: the pattern of waves, or ripples, left by the ebbing tide in the drying sand. The whole conceptual universe of permanence vs. change, stationary vs. moving, Form vs. Matter is thus reduced to a single concrete visual image, available to anyone who’s ever walked on a sandy beach. Subtract the word-play, and this is the precise mind that can solve the following two riddles. (I could add that “The Riddle of Hands” and “The Riddle of Bowing” have to do with jiriki and tariki—two terms taken from Zen, denoting “self-power” and “other-power”—but this is just a later conceptual gloss; it’s not really a hint but only a smoke-screen, a misdirection.) And so:
The Riddle of Bowing
In every culture, in every place and time, there has always been a religion, and in every one of these religions there has always been the gesture of bowing so fully that the
forehead strikes the ground.
Why is this?
(There is only one right answer to this riddle)
________________________________________________
COMMENTARY BY THE RED MONK
Sooner or later the gesture is necessary no matter which way you go. Suzuki bows with so much confidence we all feel bold.The Riddle of Hands
In every culture, in every place and time, there has always been a religion, and in every one of these religions, there has always been the gesture of hands clasped together, as Christians do to pray, in order to signify something important.
Why is this?
(There is only one right answer to this riddle)
________________________________________________COMMENTARY BY THE RED MONK:
The gesture has but one source. Who would think to pick his nose, or cross his eyes at such a moment?
The man who claims to feel power between his hands is lost in forms and ideas. The man who clasps his hands and waits will never see the light.
Lew comments:
It is no accident that people, everywhere, have always clasped their hands that way, for those purposes. Think about it. Why not any of the millions of other gestures and stances? Why, always, this one?
The Riddle of Bowing is the much easier of the two. Try that first and use the same Mind to try to solve Hands.
But please don’t waste my time by telling me that Bowing shows respect for the earth or that you are vulnerable to a great power or you are submitting to something. I haven’t got time for that baby-talk.
Lew told me the answer to “Bowing,” and I solved “Hands” by myself, my answer later confirmed by Magda Cregg, Lew’s common-law wife, after Lew’s death. I may in fact be the only living person who knows the answers to both these riddles—except for Peter Coyote whom I told them to, since I thought they might be useful to him as a (now) Zen roshi as part of his own curriculum. (Anyone who thinks he or she has solved one or both of them is invited to apply to me, since I am empowered to say “pass” or “fail.”)
As for the perception-exercise mentioned above, it came to me the day I first met Lew Welch. My high school friend Bill Trumbly rang me up one day to say that he was too hung-over to attend Lew’s poetry class at the College of Marin in Greenbrae, so he suggested that I take his place. And so, in a landscaped garden on the College grounds, complete with a sunken patio and a grove of redwood trees, I met Lew; the only other student present was poet Mary Norbert Körte, a Dominican nun in the early stages of leaving the Order, and probably the Catholic Church as well. Unexpectedly, this strange… lean… intense… rawboned… plainly emphatic… deliberately concrete… painstakingly simple man seemed more interested in teaching us perception exercises than in talking about poetry.
“Take a look at those redwood trees over there” he said. “Now imagine the spaces between the trees as solid objects, and the trees themselves as empty spaces.” And we did it; we saw as he saw. In so doing, we perceptually actualized (I realized later) the famous line “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” from the Heart Sutra of the Mahayana Buddhists, and learned how to see the world not as a set of literal objects, nor yet as nothing but fantasy-images inside our own heads, but as a third thing, placed exactly between them: a thing called an apparition. This is essentially the Mahayana Buddhist teaching of shunyata and tathata: that phenomena are without any “hidden” self-nature (this being shunyata or “voidness”), and consequently that the way they appear to us is precisely what they are (this being tathata or “suchness”). As Lew himself put it in a program note for a reading at the San Francisco State Poetry Center, part of which appears in I Remain, his collected correspondence: “I try to write accurately from the poise of mind which lets us see that things are exactly what they seem.” And the thing that prevents us from seeing things like this is our identification of those things with our names for them, as if the name could objectively limit and define, and thus virtually constitute, the thing itself. The Buddhists say, “to name something is to kill it.” In line with this viewpoint, Lew wrote, in his poem “‘Everybody Calls me Tricky, but my Real Name’s Mr. Earl’: A Sermon”:
Those who live in the world of words kill us who seek
Union with
What goes on whether we look at it or not.
But what does union with something that goes on whether you look at it or not have to do with looking at things in a different way, a way that makes them apparitional rather than literal? In his poem “Four Studies in Perception” Lew explained it, to the best of his ability, like this:
A grove of Laurel grows in the city park.
It grows whether I look at it or not,
By a path deliberately unintended (unattended).
I can find it. I can see it. I can sing:
Magical Tree!
Leaf in my mother’s stew!
Crown! Chew
Thy leaves to brighten
color in my eyes?
But all of it,
Singer, Song, the Grove itself
disappears, instantly,
if only I look another way.
If I only look another way, I make
Bulldozers, Baseball Players, and, later
Owls….
It grows whether I look at it or not.
If, as I plan, I wish to chew these leaves and
braid myself a wreath,
I cannot wish the Grove to grow on Taraval Street
And all our Certainties are
tinier thoughts, even
than that.
(Note, in the phrase “look another way” above, the pun between “look in another direction” and “look in another manner.”)
Beyond the world of words, the perceptual seed that Lew Welch planted in my psyche that day at the College of Marin sprouted years later on the occasion when, meditating with my eyes open in a redwood grove in Gerstle Park in San Rafael, California, the redwood grove was suddenly transformed into a birch grove: the redwood trees, empty; the spaces between them, birch trees. I believe that this way of seeing is a true step toward preventing our experience of the world from supporting our habit of ego-identification, since such a world is neither simply a mental image, a part of “me,” nor is it a literal lump of stuff sitting there outside me, something that possesses self-nature and that consequently supports my belief that I myself possess self-nature. If the world is an apparition, if it is void of self-nature (shunyata) and exactly as it appears (tathata), then my own body, along with my feelings, my mind, and my mind-contents, are also apparitions in exactly the same sense—apparitions arising co-dependently in the same Original Mind—and the full realization of this truth is Perfect Total Enlightenment.
This way of seeing, however, has another and darker side—because the perception-altering exercises designed to “stop the world” that appear in the book Journey to Ixtlán by Carlos Castaneda (1972) bear a great resemblance to the one that Lew taught to me and Sister Mary Norbert that day in 1966 on the grounds of the College of Marin; Lew in fact introduced me to Castaneda at one of his “full moon mussel feasts” at Muir Beach in 1968. To deconstruct the world in order to help deconstruct the self is one thing; to deconstruct it so as to later construct a “better” world and a “better” self is something else entirely. It is precisely at this point where the paths of mysticism and magic diverge. Whether Lew learned his exercise from Castaneda or Castaneda from Lew I have no way of knowing for sure—though it is unlikely that Lew would have been in touch with Castaneda in ’66, two years before The Teachings of Don Juan came out—but as we shall see in Part III, the influence of Carlos Castaneda on Lew Welch, particularly on the occasion of his death, was as sinister as can possibly be imagined.
II: Lew Welch’s Metaphysical Dilemma
The goal that destiny set for Lew Welch was, precisely, self-uninvention, self-transcendence, ego-death, Enlightenment—a dilemma he expressed, In his poem “Leo’s Poet-plight,” as:
HOW CAN I LEARN TO GET OUT OF MY WAY?
and:
The question only a German could ask:
How can I try not to try
I believe that Lew Welch was more desperately serious about his quest for ego-transcendence than any other major figure of his generation, because he well knew that if he didn’t succeed in killing this ego of his it would eventually kill him. He defined and expressed this universal metaphysical and existential dilemma perfectly—a dilemma that, in its own terms, on its own level, is perfectly insoluble. In Volume Two of I Remain Lew gives us his deepest and most revealing picture of this struggle for self-uninvention, in a draft of a letter to fellow-poet Robert Duncan, a letter he never sent. In that letter he defines his dilemma in terms of opening and closing. He says:
After the radiant vision of openness, yesterday, I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream, and vowed never, ever, to close myself again.
….[earlier] at Ferlinghetti’s Big Sur cabin….I got the most radiant vision of openness. I saw how this was all meaning. That I was only a mess of gates. That having Human Being is to have many many gates, that it all all flow through.
That it was right, too, that we have a Self. That it all be transformed. Different on the way out.
Magnificent! But then he says:
And all of this was so powerful my penis came erect, with no sex to it, as the old saying goes “putting your prick through the window, and fucking the world” with helpless love!
What is this? Some black satori?
For I cannot stay open to it. It hurts too much. But what is it that hurts?
**
For whatever it is that hurts. Whatever it is that needs to rest from time to time. Whatever it is that can be opened to the flow of it, or closed from pain.
This must be killed again and again!
The really tragic thing about the drowning and gunshots and the irreclaimable madnesses [i.e., the breakdowns and suicides of so many poets] is this:
They, Poets all of them, missed the truth by a quarter of an inch.
You do not have to do it with a gun. You really do not do it with a gun.
Though, lately, I begin to wonder how many more times I can kill this thing. Is he always going to grow? Will he always be that same shape? Is there some error to the way I keep doing it. Perhaps I try to come back from it, instead of resting on it, when I’m through with it….
Ultimately Lew did miss the truth, by even less than a quarter of an inch. He missed it by exactly twenty-two one-hundredths of an inch: the width of a .22 caliber bullet.
Is it possible to state the essence of Lew Welch’s fatal dilemma? I believe it is. The essence of his dilemma, and ours, is that I—the ego—cannot uninvent itself, transcend itself, kill itself, since it must assert itself and maintain itself in the very act of trying to do away with itself. “How can I learn to get out of my way?” You can’t. “How can I try not to try?” You can’t. You can’t kill the thing that closes and denies itself, or opens so wide it hurts, no matter how many times you try, no matter how many lifetimes you end with a single gunshot to the temple.
Why can’t you kill the ego? There are two ways to say it, which come down to the same thing: 1) because the ego, in the act of claiming the right and the duty to kill itself, affirms itself, and 2) because the ego does not exist. As the Cha’an Buddhists say it, “all beings are Enlightened from the beginning; from the beginning, not a thing is.” This is the dark contradiction, the Black Satori, hidden in the Buddha’s teaching, “work out your own salvation with diligence”—because if the you who is to work out its own salvation is the ego, that salvation will never come.
So why couldn’t Lew Welch get out of his way? The poem entitled “The Entire Sermon of the Red Monk” contains the answer; it goes like this:
1.
We invent ourselves.
2.
We invent ourselves out of ingredients we didn’t
choose, by a process we cannot control.
3.
The Female Impersonator, and the Sadistic Marine can
each trace himself back to the same stern, or weak, father.
4.
Usually it’s less dramatic. He was only indifferently
a basketball player. Now he is selling cars.
5.
The baby on the floor cannot be traced, forward,
to anything.
6.
It’s all your own fault then.
7.
On all kinds of baby purpose, you invented whoever
you think you are. Out of ingredients you couldn’t
choose, by a process you can’t control.
8.
All you really say is, “Love me for myself alone.”
9.
It’s also possible to uninvent yourself. By a process
you can’t control.
10.
But you invented Leo. Forget it.
The last two words of the poem are ambiguous. Does Lew mean, “forget trying to uninvent Leo, he’s a great creation, the very self you always wanted to be”? Or does he mean “Forget the self you invented”? Part of the answer appears in I Remain as part of a letter to Allen Ginsberg, in the form of an earlier non-yet-titled version of “The Entire Sermon of the Red Monk” where Section 10, the last line, reads: “I call my uninvention: Leo.”
That’s the problem right there—because if you personify your uninvention you haven’t really uninvented yourself; all you’ve done is create what you believe to be a bigger and better self; if the uninvention had really happened there would have been no name. Lew, as a wounded, damaged soul, always trying to walk and dance on the surface of an ocean of grief, couldn’t do without his “Leo,” his poetic brilliance. Leo was harmonious and ordered and streaming with light; Lew was dark and fragmented and chaotic. Leo was a bandage over the unhealed wound that Lew always carried, a swift smart yacht cleaving the white-capped ocean of his endless grief, the mother grief. As he said in a poem about his mother that came to him word-for-word in a dream (as recounted in his book How I Work as a Poet, 1973):
Through the years of her speech
a persistent gong
told us how grief had
cracked the bell of her soul.
So Leo was not his uninvention; it was only a clever evasion of the ultimate spiritual death-before-death that the Sufis call fana’—which is why (as we will see below), when Leo was transformed in the end into Turkey Buzzard, nothing was left for Lew Welch but literal bodily death. You may kill the body in an attempt to kill the ego, but that strategy never works; the body dies, the ego goes on. Turkey Buzzard, Lew’s “suicide identity,” may have been a sincere attempt to mortify the fatal glory of his Leo by embracing death willingly, but it was still not the true self-uninvention; it remained embedded in the realm of Name and Form. So the Catch-22 of self-uninvention was still not overcome: that if you’re going to try and uninvent yourself, you’ll have to be there to do it. Albert Camus in The Rebel, his pivotal study of suicide, definitely got to the essential, though deceptive, “metaphysic” behind the act when he said that the true motivation for suicide is the belief (which he himself held) that it represents the greatest possible degree of self-determination and self-realization, since even if I don’t have the power to create myself I can still claim total self-ownership by exercising the one power I do have, the power to end myself; I can opt to kill the body so that the ego may live. Consequently, though we may define suicide as a radical act of self-uninvention, in reality it is nothing but the most total commitment to the survival of the false self that it is possible to make.
Self-uninvention always needs something other than the self, something outside the ego, to be truly accomplished. Not even Jesus Christ had the power to deconstruct himself; he had to leave that to the Will of his Father operating through Judas, through the Jewish Sanhedrin, through the Roman authorities. If he had hung himself like Judas did that wouldn’t have worked; “take up your noose and follow Me” could never have been the basis of a real spiritual Way. In Buddhist terms that “something outside the ego” is the Zen tariki, “other-power,” or the guidance of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, or the gift-waves of the Vajra Guru. Without that intervention, and one’s complete willingness to receive it, the Buzzard-ego will keep on gliding through its dim twilight world forever, never fully alive, never completely dead.
III: Bad Medicine: The Buzzard Cult
Lew Welch, like many poets of the Beat/Hippie era, sometimes thought of himself as a magician, an identification that usually grew up when the poet in question was failing in either his or her art or his or her life. And undoubtedly his most successful magic act was to conjure up a posthumous cult for himself, so as to mystify and glamorize what was, after all, just one more sordid alcoholic suicide. He did this through a poem entitled “Song of the Turkey Buzzard,” which was his poetic suicide note; the poem, which came in answer to the third of his three spiritual riddles, “The Rider Riddle,” which is basically a way of finding your helping spirit in the form of a “totem” animal or plant; it goes like this:
If you spend as much time on the Mountain as you
should, she will always give you a Sentient Being to ride:
animal, plant, insect, reptile, or any of the Numberless Forms:
What do you ride?
(There is one right answer for every person, and only
that person can really know what it is.)
“The Mountain” was Mt. Tamalpais. Lew asked this riddle of himself and, though he wanted “Cougar” more than anything, he got “Turkey Buzzard” instead. In “Song of the Turkey Buzzard,” he says:
The rider riddle is easy to ask
But the answer might surprise you.
How desperately I wanted Cougar
(I, Leo, etc.)
brilliant proofs: terrain,
color, food, all
nonsense. All made up.
They were always there, the
laziest high-fliers, bronze-winged,
the silent ones.
**
Hear my last Will & Testament:
Among my friends there shall always be
one with proper instructions
for my continuance.
Let no one grieve.
I shall have used it all up
used up every bit of it.
What an extravagance!
What a relief!
On a marked rock, following his orders,
place my meat.
All care must be taken not to
frighten the natives of this
barbarous land, who
will not let us die, even
as we wish.
With proper ceremony disembowel what I
no longer need, that it might more quickly
rot and tempt
my new form
So there’s no mystery about the mysterious disappearance of Lew Welch; he just committed suicide like he said he would. He had instructed “the one with proper instructions for [his] continuance” (a job for which nobody volunteered) to “disembowel what I no longer need/ That it might more quickly rot, and tempt/ My new form”—that form being the Buzzard that would then arrive to eat his guts—but when that idea fell through, because nobody felt comfortable (understandably) about fulfilling that rather sinister role, he undoubtedly went over to Plan B. On one occasion he had said to our mutual friend Frank Dietrich: “Up in the Sierras there’s these granite crevasses hundreds of feet deep. You could balance on the edge of one, blow your brains out, and topple right in; you’d never be found.” So it’s clear, to me at least, that he finally opted to end his life in so inaccessible a setting that his body could not be recovered—and to do this after so thoroughly mythologizing his death with “Song of the Turkey Buzzard” that some of us would imagine that he really had shape-shifted, like Castaneda’s Don Juan Matus had reportedly shapeshifted into the form of a crow, instead of going through some boring, conventional, bourgeois human death. By doing this he recruited us, whether we knew it or not, to help him create the thought-form of Lew Welch the Buzzard God that he planned to inhabit in the next world—or maybe just in the borderland between this world and the next, the Limbo where those souls end up who can neither embrace life nor let it go. And so, much better for both him and us than the Buzzard Cult would be for us to pray or visualize or allow or command that the soul of Lew Welch be freed from the possessiveness of the living and the nets of memory so it can finally soar free, finally really make it to that “new form” he was hoping for. Who wants to be a ghost gliding sluggishly through an earth-bound sky? Better to be a full human form in a real sky, with real earth under your feet, a much stronger and solider earth than the wavering, crumbling, phantom, so-called earth we live in today. It’s high time to let Lew Welch go, and free ourselves at the same time from the darker sides of his influence; it’s time to clear the way.
If we are really going to do this, however, we will first need to confront his self-engineered departure from this world in its full darkness—Because for Lew Welch to create, through the skillful use of poetry, a thought-form in people’s minds of himself as a Buzzard God who never had to undergo normal human death but merely shape-shifted instead into a preternatural Buzzard form, unalive and undead, was nothing less than an act of evil magic. The body may die, the human form itself may pass away, but one thing will remain forever unchanged: the ego. The self-invented man-lion that Lew called Leo, his poetic persona, glorious and radiant like the sun, was what the ego, which is nothing but a dream of itself, always dreams of being; but Turkey Buzzard, Lew’s terminal alter-ego that finally replaced his Leo, looks a lot more like what the ego really is: an entity that can’t assimilate life like the spirit can but lives only on death—if you can call the existence of an earth-bound ghost, unable to either embrace life or let it go, “living” in any sense. And when those who appreciate Lew Welch but fail to truly understand him—the ones who never wake up to the enigma he trapped them with—gather on a hilltop on the anniversary of his death to salute the wheeling buzzards with a rueful “Hey, Lew!”, all they are really saluting is their own spiritual failure, while at the same time building a secret permission to commit a hopefully glamorized suicide of their own if they ever find themselves in serious need of an escape hatch to nowhere. Once at Magda Cregg’s big green decommissioned school bus on Bolinas Mesa, the one she lived in before her son, Huey Lewis, made it big with his band Huey Lewis and the News and bought her a house, a woman of her entourage made the suggestion to me that if I was really Lew Welch’s star pupil I ought to commit suicide just like he did to truly claim that inheritance. On top of that I know of two actual copycat suicides that happened in Lew’s wake, one of Jack Boyce and another of “Burl,” a sleepy sodden youth who attached himself to Magda after Lew’s disappearance, and later jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. And the fact that Turkey Buzzard represents the ego-bound inability to either generously embrace life or cleanly let it go was perfectly expressed by Magda when she said (quoted from memory): “Live people have bodies. Dead people leave bodies. But Lew has no body, so he is neither alive nor dead; he’s disappeared”—disappeared yet always furtively re-appearing, and thus perfectly in line with the obsessive-compulsive disorder that every ghost, every ego, is trapped in. As Magda asked me on one occasion after Lew’s disappearance, “Have you ever felt like your soul has died before your body?” So there was some pretty dark stuff going on in the Buzzard Cult; if Lew’s mysterious disappearance and transformation had been a reality instead of a deceptive fantasy cooked up by great art operating in negative mode, it would have been no better than an advertisement for the life, or half-life, of a skinwalker.
This inability to cleanly choose either life or death is also accurately diagrammed in the last words of Lew’s prose suicide note: “I’m going southwest. Good-bye.” Finding your characteristic point on the medicine wheel of the four cardinal directions was one of the sorcery techniques transmitted by Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, and that Lew finally chose Southwest, or had it chosen for him, is a dead giveaway. North is the other world, the world of the Transcendent. East is the flow of life and revelation from that world into this world. South is this world per se, our familiar terrestrial existence now appearing as self-created, self-sufficient and therefore as relatively closed to anything higher. And West is death, the dissolution of terrestrial existence, the ebb of life and realized earthly experience back to its transcendent Source in the North, that being the place the ancient Greeks knew as the Hyperborean Paradise and that T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world,” whose emblem is the Pole Star, the visible point of Eternity in the created order. For Lew, South would have been to clean up his act, stop drinking, finish building his cabin on Ginsberg’s land at Snyder’s Kitkitdizze in the Sierras, and accept the normal, human, prosaic aspects of earthy life. West would have been to let Death take him in Death’s own time, without trying to gain a controlling handle on the Great Mystery by jumping the gun through a mythologized suicide. But Lew chose neither of those; what he opted to do instead was to slide slimly between life and death, between the South and the West, into an endless, changeless, quasi-eternity of existence as a Buzzard God—a form that was incapable of doing him, or us, any real good at all. And this was in no way in line with Gautama’s “noble eight-fold path,” whose goal is freedom from the Wheel of Birth and Death. When, as recounted by Gary Snyder in his poem “For/From Lew” (from Axe Handles, 1983), Lew Welch appeared to him after his death—undoubtedly in a dream—and told him: “Teach the children about the cycles./ The life cycles. All the other cycles./ That’s what it’s all about and it’s all forgot,” Lew appeared to be saying that the Wheel of Birth and Death is all there is: all samsara, no Nirvana—though it’s also true to say that you can’t really see the cycles while you’re still caught up in them; only Nirvana can truly know samsara. Around the same time I dreamt that I saw Lew seated on the orbit of the Earth while looking sadly at the distant Sun—a Sun with animals crashing through forests inside its face. In terms of name and form the Wheel and its subordinate wheels may indeed be all there is, but one major step toward Perfect Total Enlightenment is not to keep orbiting on the rim of that Wheel but to take your seat at the center of it, in what the Buddhists call “the center in the midst of conditions,” until the universe turns around you instead—or rather around the non-existent Point within you from which you emanate, and into which you disappear.
More than anyone else it was Carlos Castaneda—with a certain amount of help from people like Lew Welch and Magda Cregg (and me too, in a small way, if the truth be known)—who introduced a supposedly Native American sorcery into mainstream American culture during the counterculture years. This, however, was before the book Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Amy Wallace, Castaneda’s one-time paramour, appeared (in 2003), where she recounts his revelation to her that he had worked at one time as an intelligence community (possibly CIA) assassin, and where she also tells the story of the several disappearances and suspected suicides among his circle of “witches” in 1998. This certainly seems in line with Lew Welch’s own suicide (in 1971), and with Magda’s habit of carrying in a leather pouch around her neck a sliver of the world’s most poisonous mushroom, the amanita verna or “destroying angel,” just in case she received the call to follow Lew into the Great Mystery. Five out of Castaneda’s six main witches—one body found in the Southern California desert, one woman found alive, the other four simply gone—might well have disappeared themselves according to the same model Lew used, that of a suicide mythologized so as to suggest not literal death but shapeshifting. So it is not outside the realm of possibility that the whole Buzzard Cult thing might have been Lew’s response to one more MK-Ultra-like assault from the Powers that Be on the hippie counterculture. How naïve we were, we “spiritual revolutionaries” of the 1960s! We thought we could mix magic and Enlightenment, “personal power” and ego-transcendence, and come to no harm; Charlie Manson from the dark side and Ram Dass from the light, along with a number of others, told us very clearly what the consequences of that would be, but apparently few of us were listening. Maybe the First Nations peoples, or some of them, can still do that and come to no harm—if, that is, they stick to the “white” magic of the medicine man, the healer—but we inheritors of two thousand years of Judeo-Christian civilization are confronted, whether we like it or not, with a much clearer and more inescapable choice (from Deuteronomy): “I lay before you death and life….therefore choose life.” And it was Lew Welch who confronted me most directly with that same choice when he introduced me not only to Carlos Castaneda, but to Samuel Lewis, “Sufi Sam.” I followed Castaneda’s path for a short way until I finally said to myself: “Why are you doing this, Charles? What’s it all for?”—but after 38 years I remain on the path first pointed out to me by Sufi Sam, and I hope to still be firmly on it when I breathe my last. Nonetheless my acquaintance with Carlos Castaneda’s way, even after counting up the serious damage it caused, has been useful to me as well, seeing that the world as a whole has become a lot more like Castaneda’s world in the years since his and Lew’s deaths in 1971 and 1998 respectively, as witness the mass attraction to the paranormal, to Sasquatches and parallel universes and UFOs; if you don’t have some idea of what such things are and how they operate you will either be seriously blindsided by them or else foolishly attracted to them. The physician has to be familiar with pathology; the warrior must know his enemy.
But whether or not the Buzzard Cult was a CIA spin-off, the fact remains that to deify the ghostly ego because both self-annihilation and self-actualization—which, mysteriously, are two faces of the same thing—have been left unfinished, is the very sign and emblem of failure in the spiritual life. The lesson, here, is well and sharply defined: the sad truth that Turkey Buzzard, the earthbound ghost-ego that dreams only of itself, is definitely not the Way Out. Nonetheless we must be grateful to Lew for revealing it with such clarity as something to be studiously avoided; in the words of William Blake from A Vision of the Last Judgement: “To be an Error and to be cast out is part of God’s design.”
IV: Why the Split?
So what, if anything, can be said about the strange fact that a man capable of developing an almost entirely new and potentially fruitful approach to the practice of Buddhism could also have died as an alcoholic suicide after involving himself in a rather spurious and increasingly sinister form of so-called shamanism, that of Carlos Castaneda—though that form was not without its moments of spiritual wisdom too, such as “Don Juan’s” statement, in The Teachings of Don Juan, that it’s a much better thing to become “a man of knowledge,” Castaneda’s version of an enlightened Buddha, than to involve oneself in the burdens and dangers of the sorcerer’s path? How can a man who had taken such strides toward liberation from the Wheel of Birth and Death—strides that were partly conceptual, but that were also based on a rare and obvious degree of direct personal experience—have lived such a disordered and self-destructive life? Jack Kerouac, in his one true Buddhist sutra, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, provides part of the answer.
The story of the composition of this “scripture” is as follows: On one occasion Kerouac, after napping on a sunny day on the lawn of his mother’s house in Florida—probably either drunk or seriously hung-over—stood up too fast and fainted, and while he was unconscious he had a powerful vision of what he called The Golden Eternity. Kerouac knew that he had seen something of great import, but he also knew that he was drinking himself to death after becoming seriously alienated from the Beat movement he had helped to found and the hippie movement that followed it. He explained this contradiction in the Scripture itself by the following words: “I was awakened to show the Way, chosen to die in the degradation of sentience, because I am mortal Golden Eternity.” Since these words apply almost perfectly to Lew Welch as well, we need to ask where this radical separation between vision and actualization came from, a dichotomy that was succinctly expressed by Lew in the prose version of his suicide note when he said: “I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality.” Why was someone who took such pains to present his profound insights concretely rather than conceptually still ridden by a massive spilt between spiritual vision and “real” life?
One answer relates to the origin and development of a psyche that’s has been split by trauma, a condition which manifested in the case of Lew Welch as Lew and his “Leo,” Lew and his “Turkey Buzzard” etc.; this well-known strategy of psychic dissociation made his life at least bearable at the particular place in his soul where the serious attempt to reach psychic integration, to bring together the ideal with the real, would have been too painful to bear. (The ego itself, every ego, is generated by the same process. The ego is nothing less than a necessary but ultimately fatal compensatory illusion created in response to the traumas of life.) Likewise his Red Monk—possibly a reflection of his guardian angel on some lower psychic level, appearing as the literary figure who comments on his riddles and acts as the author of “The Entire Sermon by the Red Monk”—was there to express a spiritual wisdom that Lew could never fully incarnate. On one occasion he told me the story of the specific trauma through which that Monk was born. He had overdosed on some drug or mixture of drugs, possibly a speed-ball (amphetamines plus barbiturates), in response to which his heart would pound like a jack-hammer and then stop entirely, over and over again. While lying in his hospital bed he saw an orb of light the size of a 50-cent piece with an oriental-looking face inside it traveling slowly up his body. When the orb reached the level of his navel it dropped down into him and disappeared. He believed that he, the old Lew Welch, had actually died on that occasion, that there was a different soul inside his body now. It could well have been experiences like this that created in him an affinity for the Castaneda world, the realm of the sorcerer and his alter-ego or “ally,” and of the human entity as composed of the tonal, all we can think of or see or know about ourselves and the world, and the nagual, everything that can never be included in this tonal, the part of us that is all Power. In terms of basic Buddhism, these trauma-generated alter-egos—Leo, Turkey Buzzard, Red Monk—are strictly equivalent to past and future lifetimes; they are created by the same process and serve the same purpose, which is to wrap a bandage or drape a veil around the pain of existence, when too near an approach to Enlightenment, before all the conditions for that Enlightenment are fulfilled in terms of the Noble Eight-fold Path, makes that pain too fierce to bear, or even to witness. On the other hand, the “radiant vision of openness” that caused Lew to see himself “a ring of bone/ in the clear stream/ of all of it” (from the poem “I Saw Myself”) is indeed a real approach to, a true foreshadowing of, Perfect Total Enlightenment. So he showed us both the Goal and the many egos (or lifetimes) we invent when we miss the Goal, and that also cause us to miss it. In all its light and its darkness, its fully available truth and its fully exposed illusion, in many ways it was a complete teaching.
But where exactly do these traumas come from, traumas serious enough to split the psyche, resulting in what today is called “dissociative identity disorder”? If you were beaten and sexually abused by a drunken father, if you were sent to Afghanistan and had your leg blown off by a land mine, you are “lucky” enough to have a clear remembered traumatic event, or series of events, to pin your PTSD to. But what if you never experienced that degree of trauma, at least in this life, and still feel fundamentally fractured, filled with swarming sub-personalities perpetually at war with one another? What excuse do you have, under these circumstances, for the disorder in your soul? People in this condition will often wrack their brains trying to remember what must have happened to them. They may resort to hypnotic past-life regression, figuring that if nothing catastrophic happened to them yet in this life, the trauma must come from some former lifetime when they were executed by firing-squad or trampled to death by a rogue elephant. Or else, a bit more plausibly, they may begin to believe that they were abducted and violated by Aliens (or the CIA), after which the CIA (or the Aliens) wiped their memory, leaving them traumatized, but with no clear remembered events, no valid excuses, to explain their fractured condition. People working on the basis of this theory may also resort to hypnotic regression to recover deeply-repressed memories, during which their psyches may dutifully manufacture the supposed traumatic events they think they must’ve experienced—thereby providing, if not truth, at least a sense of validation and closure. And this ambiguous condition is further complicated by the fact that some people actually have been abducted, violated, and their memories subsequently wiped, by the Aliens, by the CIA, by the Satanists, by God-knows-who.
One common source of psyche-splitting trauma is, however, rarely considered today: the birth trauma. Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud more-or-less defined the birth trauma as the shock of being ejected from the warmth and security of the maternal womb into the cold, cruel, dangerous outer world—but that’s not how I see it. The real birth trauma, in my opinion, is the shock of being exiled from an angelic spiritual universe of boundness light and freedom only to be trapped in the dark, wet, clinging, suffocating maternal womb that Rank and Freud falsely saw as a paradise of peace and security. And the greater the ontological distance between a given soul’s pre-birth station and the earthly conditions it is subsequently born into, the more rigorous the birth trauma will be. It is the saints, or at least those with a degree of spiritual elevation, not the worldlings who take to earthly life like a spaniel to water, who will tend to sing, along with the Carter Family: “This world is not my home/ I’m just a-passing through/ My treasures and my hopes/ Are all beyond the blue….I can’t feel at home in this world any more.” Lew certainly tried his best to feel at home here, even to the point of more-or-less worshipping the Earth as a goddess, but what he ultimately realized was that all the “brilliant proofs” he was searching for, the “terrain,” the “color,” the “food,” were basically empty: “all nonsense. All made up.”
A second and somewhat less arcane explanation for this split between vision and reality has to do with the historical formation of the Western psyche, which is centrally based on two thousand years of Judeo-Christian faith. Buddhism is a profound and comprehensive way; nonetheless those westerners who are attracted to it because they are in flight from the Judeo-Christian God, or more specifically from Jesus Christ, will not find what they are looking for in Gautama’s admonition to “work out your own salvation with diligence.” Buddhism, like any true spiritual path, is a method, not a hiding-place. I don’t mean to imply that the only valid approach to spiritual enlightenment is through the Abrahamic notion of a Personal God, or specifically through Jesus Christ; when Christ said “None come to the Father but through me,” I take this to mean that the only way beyond the limitations of the human state is directly through the human state, through what the Buddhists call the Nirmanakaya. In the Buddhist concept of the Trikaya, Enlightenment takes three forms: Dharmakaya, the formless Absolute Reality in itself; Sambhogakaya, this Reality as expressed through “mythological” apparitions of various celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; and Nirmanakaya, the reality of Enlightenment as it appears in the person of one’s human teacher. Some westerners can certainly become true Buddhists without this flight from the God of their fathers, but for others the ghost of the rejected Divinity is neither fully confronted nor fully escaped. Lew himself once revealed his flight from the Christian God when he said to me, “Who could ever worship a Holy Ghost?” Likewise Gary Snyder, on the occasion of Philip Whalen’s memorial service at the Green Gulch Zen Center, told me: “Face it, Charles: Buddhism is atheism.”
This, however, is in no way accurate. In one Theravadin text, Gautama says: “If it were not for the Unborn, the Unmade, the Uncompounded, there would be no escape from what is born, what is made, what is compounded.” Likewise the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists speak of the Original Buddha or Adibuddha, and the Pure Land Buddhists, who far outnumber the followers of Zen, pray to the Buddha Amitabha just as the Jews and Christians and Muslims pray to God. Even the Zen people say, “Before you become enlightened, first you have to be enlightened.” “What is Unborn, Unmade, Uncompounded”—is God. The Dharmakaya—is God. The Adibuddha, or Amitabha the Buddha of Boundless Light—is God. Even the Zen notion of an Enlightenment that exists previous to one’s own attainment of Enlightenment, such that it is possible to say that “all things have the Buddha-nature”—is God. These conceptions of an Absolute First Principle that is also the Real Nature of Things may differ from the more personal or personalistic versions of this Principle that are current in the Abrahamic religions—though we must never forget that these religions have their own impersonal or transpersonal renditions of the Absolute First Principle: Ein Sof, Göttheit, Al-Dhat—nevertheless they make it impossible to identify Buddhism with simple atheism. The “atheistic Buddhism” of the West is based on nothing more that the wrongheaded and dishonest attempt of some westerners to possess the religion that their universal human instinct demands without needing to let go of their post-medieval materialism, or without dealing with the personalistic, overly-judgmental and culturally degenerate images of God they are in flight from. I believe that this wrongheadedness and dishonesty of a dying Western Civilization that is becoming alienated from its spiritual roots is one of the things that trapped Lew Welch, and Jack Kerouac too—so obviously a pious French Catholic believer, like Francois Villon was, as far as his emotional life was concerned—in the suicidal dichotomy that ultimately killed them both. This, too, stems from a trauma-based split in the psyche, though in this case it is a collective trauma rather than a personal one—because when Gautama’s “work out your own salvation with diligence” is seen, in western mode, as the personal achievement of the “self-made man,” if it is attempted outside a sacred context which realizes that Enlightenment is not fundamentally an achievement but something that exists before me and can get along quite well without me—if, that is, the Buddhist way is reduced to the attempt of the ego to save itself by its own egotistical methods—then it will become a mad obsession that is just as likely to disorder or destroy the human person as to save it. The pre-existence of Enlightenment is unavoidable because Enlightenment is Reality—and Reality calls to us. The practice is, in Lew Welch’s words from “Wobbly Rock,” to “sit real still and keep your mouth shut”—this being the very thing that will allow you to hear that call and follow it, while simultaneously making it possible for you to you clearly witness, and thereby dis-identify with, the trauma-generated splits in the psyche that appear in body, in feelings, in mind, and in mind-contents. The alter-egos that spring from these splits, pathological as they will necessarily be, may nonetheless represent real attempts to reach the freedom of true objectivity by at least beginning to dissolve the knots of self-identification—but since they can never be anything but half-measures it’s a toss-up whether they will act to mitigate the original damage or just end up making things that much worse. But whether or not these traumatic splits can ever be “healed” on their own level, we can nonetheless witness them from the standpoint of a spiritual reality that, because it can never be split, needs no healing. “Fixing yourself up” is an endless task; a whole lifetime is not time enough to get it done. The true and only path to self-actualization and integrity and freedom from the illusions of self-identification is to let yourself go—and this is something that can happen in the twinkling of an eye.
**
[For more about Lew Welch and Magda Cregg, as well as other Beat poets including Allen Ginsberg, and the counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s as a whole, see Giving Myself Away, the autobiography of Charles Upton.]
