Eagalic Music

I remember standing on the highway, having somehow traveled as far as the outskirts of Vancouver, realizing that I did not want to head back east, that I in fact did not want to go anywhere.

I walked back and forth from side to side of the highway, totally confused, first hitching one direction and then the other in hopes that I would just go with the first ride that happened. But, miraculously, no one stopped. Slowly, it dawned on me that I did not have to leave the province just because my relationship was over.

I made my way back to Victoria and throwing my fate to the winds, although I was totally broke, I rented a room downtown at the Fairfield Hotel.  The setting did not do much to improve my sense of isolation and failure, for the hotel was populated largely by old men teetering on the brink of poverty and loneliness.

I applied for and received my first welfare cheque but the money was barely enough for rent with a little left over for food and I existed for the first month by buying an order of toast and jam each morning at a local coffee shop and eating a yogurt and a scone each afternoon for my main meal.

After some time I guess my dilemma became apparent to the hotel manager, who offered me a job painting rooms to cover some of my expenses.

During this time I found a second hand copy of Lama Govinda’s “Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism” in a local bookshop and I began reading it in earnest and renewing my efforts at long meditation periods.  Someone had made a felt-pen drawing inside the front cover of an androgynous figure seated in full lotus position, with a halo of light around the head and the caption “awareness of breath in belly, the fourth way.”  This tallied with my own practice and seemed to be a symbol of my present intention.

Sitting cross-legged on my bed I could see my whole body reflected in the dressing table mirror which was just opposite the bed and so I developed a method of focusing on this image while “watching” the breath.  I was also continuing to keep a journal.

One day, as I was meditating on my image in the mirror an extraordinary occurrence took place. My body became luminous, as though it was subtly lit from behind and within and in place of my face,  first my mother’s face,  then my father’s face and finally a succession of faces appeared. These faces were totally lifelike, alive and very present, not at all like figments of my imagination. I was stunned to see this procession of faces slowly revealing themselves to me. They seemed to go back in time revealing something of myself in each of them. They seemed also to belong to different nationalities and the thought came to me that I was seeing pictures of myself in past incarnations going back finally to a shaman-like face of an old man sitting in a cave.

The experience lasted no more than a few minutes but it shocked and dazed me. I had taken no drugs for a long time now and the “realness” of this insight affected me deeply.  I felt I was being shown something of significance to help me in my growth and to this day I feel the same.

I came out of this with the understanding that my path for self-discovery was not just the product of this lifetime but went back for generations before me.  I do not know if the being I saw was myself or my “relations” but I do know that somehow what I saw was and is intimately connected with who I am.

And who am I, after all?  This, of course, is the eternal question.

Paul Reps, who I was soon to meet,  put it in this way in his books, “Who is?”,  from which I extracted the idea that the one who is asking, the questioner at least, exists.

During this time I tried to renew my relationship with my son Chad by visiting him in Mill Bay. There was the possibility of a reconciliation between Veronica and me, at least in my mind, but over time it became apparent that this would never be.

I realized I had to get on with my own life, as painful as this whole experience was to me.  I even did a concert with Veronica and another local singer, Maury Stanley, which was a minor tour de force for us as artists and friends. But Veronica was now in another relationship, determined to do her own thing and so the best thing I could do was to struggle onward on my own in the best way I knew how.

Eventually I found a cabin outside Duncan on the Maple Bay Road where I spent a winter writing music, trying to write a book, drinking too much and wrestling with my personal demons.

I fell for a young lass named Sue Torrance who was already in a confusing relationship and who asked me to help her out of it.  I was very lonely for female company and so I forgive myself for not being too clear-headed about my priorities. Yet because her lover was my best friend Robert James, to whom I already owed a great debt of gratitude, I was in for a solid dose of good old-fashioned self-punishment over the next couple of years, trying to establish a relationship with Sue.

To top it off, the house was freezing that winter, despite a fireplace and I spent most of my time in the kitchen with the electric oven turned on trying to stay warm. It was either there or the pub where I spent too many long days and finally paid the price of getting my nose broken in a fight, which woke me up I suppose and moved me out of that scene.

My meditation was intensifying though, despite the contradicting outer circumstances and I had an experience in the house of being pulled out of my body by some kind of electrical current that made a huge whooshing noise as it took me up and “out”.  There were also a series of paranormal experiences in the house that were hair-raising and made for an interesting winter, such as candles flying across the room for no reason, knocks at the window and door with no one there and objects disappearing and re-appearing after I’d already looked in the same spot for them.  Or perhaps I was drinking so much that these were varieties of pink elephants!

Finally the spring came. I was visiting Robert in his studio one morning when a little old white-haired man wearing baggy pants, sneakers and a floppy little white Mr. Magoo type sun hat came through the door.  Robert introduced him as Paul Reps and he looked me directly, smilingly in the eye and shook my hand warmly.

I was impressed both by him and by his reputation,  for I’d already read “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” his classic collaboration with Zen master Nyogen Senzaki first published in 1957.

While Robert busied himself with customers I sat with Reps and told him a dream I’d had the night before of sitting in a classroom in a University of the Soul behind an older man with a white shock of hair on the back of his head which looked like a wing.  It seemed a perfectly natural thing to tell and Reps was quite interested. I did not know then that this meeting was to be the beginning of an apprenticeship or that I had met a powerful teacher.

I began visiting “reps” (as he called himself) regularly when he moved into a little trailer up behind Robert’s house.  Robert was working on a book of short stories at the time and by way of repaying him for his help I was doing some typing and editing for him.  He’d taken a photograph of me at work one day, a profile which clearly showed my bad posture and he’d shown the photograph to reps.  Reps had seen it and remarked to Robert, “His head’s not on straight!”, a very typical reps comment, which Robert passed on to me.  I wondered what he meant by that remark and Robert suggested I go and ask him.

That first meeting with reps outside his trailer, is etched in my memory.

I was very nervous as I approached the trailer and could feel my legs giving out beneath me.  I didn’t know what I was going to say but I did know, instinctively, that this was going to be a very important meeting.  I assumed we’d talk as we had in the studio a few days before although my knees were shaking badly as I approached his door.

I knocked and reps appeared in the doorway, his sparse white hair disheveled and sticking up. His bright blue eyes were piercing.  It was as though he’d been waiting for me.  I fumbled for the words.  “Robert told me that you said my head wasn’t on straight.”

These words sounded totally ridiculous to me as I spoke them.  Reps took a step toward me, stuck out his hand and grabbed me by the hair on the top of my head.  He yanked sharply upward.  It hurt.  Then he spun me around and gave me a judo chop in the back between the shoulder blades.  Then he asked me to face him and follow his movements; feet together, parallel, knees slightly flexed, hands joined, palms facing outward and arms lifted, stretched slowly to the limit above the head.

I followed suit dumbly, shocked but compliant. “All right“, said reps, “end of lesson. Come back tomorrow.”  The trailer door closed and I was  left standing on the porch.

The next day I returned and the next, for many days. Each day was a lesson in simplicity, wisdom, humor, all given in a perfectly natural, easy way. Not like lessons at all but simply…meetings.  But lessons nonetheless.

The life of my spirit seemed a parallel journey to the musical one though I was beginning to get an inkling that the two were somehow connected.  But in my meetings with reps it was not audible music that was discussed. Rather we talked about the inner music, the tuning of the spirit that precedes sound.

I had been reading the writings of the Indian mystic-musician Hazrat Inayat Khan but I didn’t know at first that reps had been Inayat’s mureed (or student) but knew of him rather as the co author of “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones”, a compilation which became an underground classic in the ’60’s.  Somewhere along the line I heard or read that reps used to “follow Inayat Khan around in California in the 1920’s” and that deepened my awe of him.

I remember asking reps, “Is there such a thing as initiation?”  Something within me had already grasped that reps symbolized more to me than a wise mentor, in the academic sense of the word. He replied instantly, smilingly, “Every meeting is an initiation.”

In those days many a young seeker looked for an initation into some form of spiritual discipline and I too was seeking some such thing but I had yet to find a path I was interested in or that seemd to suit me.

Reps did not align himself with any of the formal wisdom traditions in his old age and so he did not initiate me in any formal sense, though I longed for such a thing without really understanding why.  I thought perhaps an initiation might bring with it something I lacked in the way of knowledge or insight.  It might even bring with it the credentials with which to proceed along my path with a new sense of dignity and purpose. But reps kept everything light and playful, totally informal.

Yet his authority, I think that is an accurate word, was powerful in my eyes.  There was something magical about his presence that went beyond words.  To be in his company was to be filled with amazement and to participate in a kind of ongoing delight at the simplest of things and circumstances.

If anyone had the power to initiate, I felt he did.  I realize now that I did receive a very important initiation from reps.  It was the realization that in fact I was not simply dreaming about the spiritual way but that I had at last met a recognized “traveler” on the path, someone who was respected and esteemed and that if my journey was only a daydream our paths would certainly never have crossed.  Aside from this, of course and much more important, was the very real teaching he was able to pass on to me.

I was amazed, impressed, confounded, awestruck by reps.  He challenged everything about me without even apparently trying. Yet there was a warmth and caring sweetness about him that nourished me in a fatherly way and made the directness of our encounters joyful, healing.

He seemed glad to see me, but would not let me get away with “ordinary” behavior.   Things that I was used to saying and doing with others I couldn’t do in his presence because they didn’t feel right, didn’t have the desired effect.

So the spring turned into summer and the idea came to me to go to Peru.  I wanted to see the Andes, so I told myself.  After all, they were the next best thing to the Himalayas, the seat of all ancient secret wisdom.  Reps would be leaving for Hawaii, where he spent his winters and I didn’t want to spend another winter in that cold house, dreaming of a relationship with Sue that would not transpire.  Because I had no money, or very little, I decided to hitch.

I reasoned that when I got to the Panama Canal, I could simply get a job on a banana boat.  No problem!  So, guitar and knapsack in hand, as in days of yore, the pilgrim set forth.

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