Saturday, December 24th
“You returned.”
David paused briefly in the doorway that had allowed him a means of escape from his third cold miserable Maine evening. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because you asked me to.” He waited, at first expecting another response, or another question. Then he realized that perhaps his own answer wasn’t complete enough for the mysterious meta-physical madman who greeted him, so he continued. “Because you asked me to, because I agreed to that asking, because finals are finally over, because everyone has abandoned the dorms for several weeks and I haven’t, because……” He waited for his own tongue to continue talking, the excuse-making machine on ‘auto-pilot.’ But it had stopped cold, and icicles were likely to form on his lower lip.
Walton spread his same forever-beneficent smile, and began walking back into the church Sanctuary, headed for the same warm woodstove and the same hot-mocha-chocolate concoction that the two of them had shared the previous evening.
“Ready for more?” he finally inquired.
“More what?” David considered playing hard-to-get.
“More of whatever melts your butter. More Midnight Mocha, more mental meanderings, more wonderful words to throw at your Sweet Mystery?” Walton sat closest to the fire, and David rested a few feet away, quite comfortable on the carpeted floor. But how did he know about the Sweet Mystery?!
“I’m ready for it all, I guess. Things haven’t changed much in recent days. Finals are over, but the tests I put myself through, the ones that I carry inside every day, — they’re still there. Omni-present obstacles.”
The old custodian handed David his drink. “Let’s play another game. I’m on a break in my cleaning chores anyway, so here are tonight’s rules: I listen, you ramble, and give me as much of a list of those ‘tests’ as you can. I’ll try not to interrupt, unless you start getting all disjointed and bum-jumbled on me. You ready?”
“Sure,” David returned, quite quietly, unsure.
“Shoot.”
Suddenly, David was on the analyst’s couch, hesitantly preparing for an extended session of ‘free association.’ “Let’s see. Where to begin?”
“Begin any place and at any time. Logic and organized time-lines are optional,” Walton encouraged.
“Okay.” With a short sigh, David began his litany of misery. “We’ll start with school.”
By the time his verbal font of frenzy was filled, he had covered 1.) the time pressures of his educational track, 2.) his courses, their testing requirements, and the limitations of his current procession of professors, 3.) the over-priced textbooks and weakly-supported theories that went along with them, 4.) the questions he had about what he was going to do with it all whenever he finished, 5.) the more pressing question about whether or not he WOULD finish, 6.) and the nagging doubt about whether anything he chose to study was worth the bother.
Brief pause, brief smile, then back to the real business that brought him to the land of mocha and melancholy.
“Closer to me than school, there is Joanna-Christine.” David paused, finding this the most difficult to put into words. “Joanna-Christine, girl of my dreams,” he whispered. Walton caught the whisper, and patiently remained silent as David tried to continue. “Joanna is, was, a classmate of mine, and maybe a soul-mate of mine, as well. And now she is a heartbreak of mine, for several reasons. One is that she’s upper class and I’m just lower country crumbs. Money is a great neutralizer of romantic ambitions. Secondly, she is currently controlled by powers other than her own. But to me, she’s a goddess on the half-shell. I worshiped every moment in school with her, every passing in hallways, every glance or word between us. Our music rehearsals, the smile, the eyes, the gentle intelligence, the walk and talk…. the list is endless.” David’s lovesick rantings also began to stream endlessly.
“But now, she’s long gone, with no forwarding address or phone contact. And I don’t know how hard I should try to track her down. Remember how hesitant I was to even come into this church a few nights ago? That’s just my way of dealing with this fear and uncertainty. So I worship my angel from afar, block my pain with busy-ness, and hope that lightning will strike the people who pulled her away from me.”
David’s tongue was now on a roll, with no impediments to his forward momentum. “I’ve got dreams to teach, to counsel, to play in a band, to write great books, to travel, to learn as much as there is to learn, about as much as there is to learn about (say that fast five times), and to love as much as my hurting heart will allow me to love.”
He further discussed the possible choices of a major for his eventual degree and his minor in music, even though his father irritatingly reminded him with increasing regularity that the limited family-provided scholar dollars were designed for career-oriented courses only, “real courses.” David’s initially mild-mannered discussion gave way to emotional demolition, blasting further into angry denouncements. With an increasing crescendo movement, and treating his verbal flow very much like a Patrick Henry wartime claim for independence, David proclaimed that his entreaties, his supplications, his petitions, his remonstrations, prostrations, and implorings had all fallen on the deaf ears and blind eyes of King Hartland of the Hampshire Hills Castle. Finally, after spending way too much energy on this point, David’s art was spent, his energy dissipated, his will shattered.
Following a few minutes of recovery breathing, he lifted his heavy head, his wettish eyes, his cowering countenance, and he completed his discourse for Walton: “I’ve left out a lot of details, obviously, but you should be able to get the idea of how screwed up this psychologist-wannabe really is. Everything seems as dark to me as a rainy Maine midnight.” David paused a moment, wondering briefly if maybe there was a really depressing blues song hidden in those last few words.
Walton shook him out of his gloomy doom mood with the intense but caring question: “What do you want?” He stared David right between the eyeballs, laser beams cutting through the weary walls that the young man had just defined around himself.
“What do you mean?” No answer. “I just told you about my list of problems. Were you listening?”
“What do you want?” Simple. Direct. Insistent.
“What do I want? I want answers. I want solutions. I want a strategy for getting through this mess. I want Joanna. I want my degree. I want a picture-perfect life with lots of stuff, and lots of places to keep that stuff, and lots of time to play with that stuff.” Another pause, met by the custodian’s continued silence. “I want it all. Got it?”
David’s frustration attempted to re-direct itself at this point. He stood up, walked around, needing to be active, to be busy with some aimless chore. He grabbed an old rag and some pew polish, and began to carelessly clean the sanctuary seats, just for something to occupy his body while his mind wrestled with itself. What am I doing here, anyways? Is this a waste? Who is this guy? Sigmund Fraud? What’s his motive? He didn’t yet feel comfortable with the new rules of conversation from this game-playing mystery man. He wanted to be heard, but was waiting to be tricked. Guard up, guard down, guard back up again, and wait for the response.
Finally, “Yes. I got it. That was a good start.”
David paused in his half-hearted wax-on, wax-off chores, and replied with a slight bow at the waist, as if sarcastically relishing his new sensei’s encouraging words. “Well?”
“Well, what?” Walton teased him on.
“Well, what do you think? About my situation, that is.”
“I think you’ve created a dandy for yourself, and I’m wondering if you’re enjoying the fruits of your own creation.”
“What do you mean by that? I didn’t create this whole mess that I’m in. It involves school, and family, and society’s demands, and time limitations, and….. well, just other things.”
Walton smiled, then slowly began: “Are you ready for your first lesson?”
“What lesson? You mean we’re going to play student-teacher during Winter break?”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
David had to consider this for a few moments, because the answer to this question wasn’t as obvious when he first entered the church sanctuary as it was now that he had been here for a while. “Well, sure. I’d love to learn some things, as long as there are no finals or long papers to hand in. I guess I’ve got nothing better to do for a couple of weeks,” he concluded, with a reluctant, but releasing, sigh.
“Don’t act so excited about it,” Walton said, his ever-present smile still in its proper place.
A pause. Decision time, buddy. End of pause. “Sorry. I really DO want to be here, I really DO want to learn from you, and I really DO want a second cup of Mountain Mocha Java, if you please.”
“Of course, I please, as pleases you,” Walton laughed, while turning to pour a second draught of potion from his magical cauldron.
Having let David ramble on through his recitation of personal problems, Walton now ceased his interrogation, and stopped humming his mechanical acknowledgment to David’s responses. Instead, he again looked David straight in the eye, and demanded one simple re/quest/ion: “You’ve shared quite a bit of yourself with me over the past few days, especially here tonight. Now, can you tell me one absolutely true thing?”
“Huh?” David was thrown off by this change in the pace of his patter. He cut off his cleaning chores in mid-stroke. His full attention was drawn to this alteration in the flow of energy between the two. Walton sat very straight, very relaxed and calm but very intentionally staring directly through David’s meandering mind. I better watch this guy. Here comes the trap. Run now, rapid rabbit, or forever mourn the loss of your furry innocence.
No longer was David the center of attention on the psychologist’s couch. He now faced a question he would never have anticipated. Walton was changing roles, changing tactics, going all “philosopher” on him. David wasn’t sure he appreciated the disruption of his “gloomy groove.”
But, answer he did, since he had no way of predicting the cliff’s edge over which he was about to step. He stood perfectly still himself, returning the burning stare.
“Wait a minute. Everything I’ve been talking about has been true, and very real to me. Why are you asking me to repeat myself?”
“I am not asking for more of the same. I added one very special word, if you were listening closely enough. I asked you to tell me just one absolutely true thing. Not something that is true for just you, but true for every single living or non-living organism on this planet. That is a different request. Can you do it?” Walton waited patiently, letting Time spin around David’s personal planet.
“One absolutely true thing? Okay.” He paused. “That should be easy, I guess.” He searched inside and outside, ready to fire his best shot. “How about this: you and I are really here.”
Walton rested for one beat, and with the next, he reflected the shot back at David: “Prove it.”
“Prove it? Prove what? Prove that we’re both here?”
“You bet. Prove it.” Walton kept his responses simple enough.
The edges of David’s brain perceived the potential trap, just as he had predicted, but the middle majority of his mind didn’t have a clue. So he scampered forward: “Well, I can see you, and touch you, and, well, sense you in several ways.”
“How is that proof that we are here?” Walton replied calmly.
“What do you mean? What more proof do you need? I can sense you and me being here. So it must be true, right?”
“Can your senses always be trusted?”
“Sure, why not?”
Then, the staccato back-and-forth fire of a Wimbledon match picked up its pace, Walton serving the next shot.
“Prove that your senses can always be trusted to be accurate.”
“Huh? How can I do that?”
“That is my question. You solve it.”
“Prove that I can prove something?”
“Yup.”
“Prove my senses? Well, they are how I see the world.”
“Prove that.”
“Prove how I see the world? Are you just playing word games with me?”
“You tell me.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Let’s see – what is proof?”
A moment’s pause, and then another attempt to control the volley over the expanding net. David’s turn to serve.
“Proof is … proof is knowing and showing that something is real.”
“Prove that. How do you know and show that something is real?”
“Because I believe it. I have faith in my own thoughts, my accumulated knowledge. And then I share that with you.”
“Prove that your beliefs are true, then.”
“Prove my beliefs? I’m not sure how to do that.”
“You claim that you can’t do that, yet you also say you base your reality on your beliefs?”
“Ummm. I guess so.”
“Prove that your reality is true, then.”
“Prove my reality?? Of course, reality is real.” David’s responses started to seem shallow, even to himself. “I mean, what is reality if it is not what we first sense, and then believe about those sensory images?”
“You tell me. Prove that your reality is real.”
“As I just said, it starts with my senses. Then I know stuff, I guess.”
“You need to go deeper than that, grasshopper. Dig.”
“I dig it,” David replied, more squeamishly than humorously. Okay, another try. Jump. “I know what I know because I learned it from people who knew it before me.”
“Good. Now, prove that all those previous beliefs, those ‘knowings’, are true.”
“Well, they must be, right? I mean, we learned them in school. There’s math, – math and science that tell us that they are true.”
“Go ahead, make my day. Prove that math and science are true.”
“How could they not be?”
“Who first made them up? Who first created our beliefs in numbers and data?”
David began to sweat just a bit, but not because of the now not-so-hot-mocha-chocolate he had been sipping during this exchange.
“Math and science have been here since the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?” Walton volleyed, with a backspin this time.
“Why, since the beginning of time, of civilization, of humans and thinking, I guess.”
“Prove it.”
“Prove what now?”
“Prove that this version of truth has always existed. In what form, what shape, how was it first created?”
David was definitely rattled by now. No late-night exam cram in college had taken him by mind-storm in this way before. But he faced the challenge, and returned the serve once again. “We created it.”
“We? Who is ‘we’? What did ‘we’ create? And how?”
David instantly retreated to the hopeful comfort of his previous philosophy professors: “Math doesn’t need humans in order to exist. It just is. It is what is right, and absolute, and, well, just there. We somehow picked it up and used it.”
Walton frowned just a bit. And then, smile regained, he attacked. “Cop out! Some magic something somewhere sometime somehow with somebody? That’s all you got? People just ‘deduced’ these things from the ethers? Like candy, just waiting to be stolen from the gods?? And I suppose you are going to tell me that, however you look at it, 2 plus 2 is always going to equal 4, right? And yet, you conveniently forget that somehow 2 and 4 are merely man-made labels conveniently placed in a man-made order to meet man-made needs for a right and wrong way to conduct measurement business. Sorry, David Lee Hartland, you lose that round. Right? Hogwash. Wrong? Arrogance. Dichotomies? Only for the weak-minded. The lazy brain. I had you pegged for deeper things, my young friend!”
The weight of Walton’s war fell heavy on David’s Being – his head ached, his heart ached, his soul split, and his personally constructed universe Banged Big-time. The Pain in the Brain Strains Mainly like a Slippery Chain in the Rain. But, like the already bloody soldier, desirous of taking out yet one more opponent as he himself crashed to the ground, David shot feebly back.
“You’re just trying to use illogic on me, or circular reasoning, just to get me confused. That’s all you’re doing. Nothing you say makes sense.”
“Circular reasoning, huh? And just what is that, my little logician?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it is when you go in circles with the same argument, but never add anything new. You just repeat phrases that go around and around until I just get tired of arguing with you!”
“You’ve been reading too many books, is what I think. The writers who criticize faulty logic also use faulty reasoning to do so. The philosophers who cut down the paradigms of their predecessors try to do so through impenetrable belief filters of their own – they make up their own language to stymie any attempts at understanding. The medical psychologists who condemn the “pop psychologists” do so because they feel that their livelihood is threatened by people who simply used Occam’s Razor to deduce much simpler answers to complex questions. And all I simply want you to tell me is this: who created all these belief systems and complex constructs? Beliefs on top of beliefs on top of beliefs. Just one big pile of Dookie. So, Doo-King David, do me a favor. Get. Out. Of. Your. Head… Please.”
Not quite sure what Walton was asking of him, David waited a few minutes. He looked inward. The inner David looked outward. What the hell is going on here? What is he asking of me? Wait. Who said that? Who created that question? Who’s asking about who created that question?? Is this madness? Is this chaos theory? What did he put in my drink?? And, for a brief moment, the thinker met his own thoughts. And it was good. A gentle mental explosion sound could be heard from eardrum to eardrum. He blew out a breath, and tried a different, almost surrendered, approach.
“You ask me who created all these beliefs? All I can come up with is this: We did. We Humans. We started it all. We created our truths to meet our needs, for survival, if nothing else. We needed our minds, our egos, to stay intact, no matter what price it cost us.”
David caught just a trace of a sparkle-filled glimmer in Walton’s eye at this last response. Onward the battle continued, but with pillows this time.
“Good. Prove it.”
A laugh mixed with a leer floated out of the now disassociated mouth of David’s face. “Do you have any other lines? Prove it? Prove it? What if I just can’t?”
Another delayed beat from the old custodian. “You can’t?”
“No, maybe I can’t,” came almost defiantly from somewhere deeper down than even David’s tightened throat. But it was no longer defiance. It was a cheer. A loud, raucous rant of re-joy-ce and retreat and repair. He was done. Nothing else to fight.
“Really? You’re done? You can’t prove any of it?” Walton rested back a few inches into his well-worn chair.
“No. I can’t prove it. I wasn’t around when the beliefs first showed up. I just wasn’t there.” David’s previous frustration had only known how to emote itself as an angry burst, with anyone anywhere as the target. The trap had snapped, and here he bled, with his cognitive paws caught in its vice-like claws.
Yet now he smiled. He relaxed. He found, in the newly released energy of his expanding boundaries, a sense of awe-full-ness: “And who knows, maybe there is no beginning. Maybe we all just made it up, just for our own convenience. Maybe there is no truth at all. It is all just a bunch of creations. A bunch of lies. There is no truth or reality, anywhere, at any time.”
David caught his breath, and Walton slowly rose up from his seat, deliberately, musically clapping his hands.
“Congratulations.”
“Huh?” David was once again thrown off center. “What do you mean, congratulations? For what?”
“For waking up, my young friend. You did it! I wasn’t sure you would, but you did it!!”
“Did what?” Head still spinning, mind no longer in control, or for that matter, functioning at all.
“You discovered the answer. And the answer is…” Walton paused for sheer entertainment value, “… there is no answer.”
David just sat, wondering if he was mad, or sad, or glad, or how he felt, or if he felt.
Walton filled the silence: “As you have just so aptly discovered, there is no absolute truth. No reality. No facts, no beliefs. No math or science. No you or me. Nothing. We are all a part of nothing.”
At first, receiving this reinforcement of his new-found freedom, David just stared, agasp and aghast, at this incredible revelation. Then the briefest of snickers escaped his lips. And then, he snickered at the fact that he was snickering. And then, he laughed at the acknowledgment that he was laughing at his own laughing. Pretty soon, he was on the floor, rolling on the floor, playing with his space on the floor, not thinking a damn thing.
“Wow!! What a trip!!” was all he could manage.
“What trip?” Walton unexpectedly jumped right back into the role of interrogator.
“Trip, man!! There is no real. No beliefs that I have to have. No truth that I am stuck with. For all these long hours talking to you, I have rattled and prattled on and on and on and on about my troubles, my miseries, like they were really real, and then all of a sudden, they don’t mean squat. They don’t mean anything at all. They are just beliefs that I have been lugging around with me in my sad pathetic life for years. And now…..”
“And now?” Walton encouraged the rest of the sentence, the reluctant birth of a new awareness.
“And now there is just space. Empty space where all that crap was once stored. I am nothing. But I am everything, if I want to be too. No limits, no restrictions, just space. I can be poop. I can be soup. I can be Betty Boop!! Doop-dee-doop! David the Dookie-King!”
David then sat, then stood, then rolled around laughing for a few more minutes before Walton asked, yet again: “Prove it.”
This time, David was ready for him. “Naw, not interested. Nothing to prove.”
Walton still pushed the boundaries of David’s new universe just a bit more: “And what about Joanna-Christine?”
Brief pause, water surface being tested before crossing … “She is a belief I also created. And our separation is another belief I created. And the rich-poor thing is another belief I created. And her absence from my life is another one… and the pressures from my dad… And, well, it’s all just beliefs, isn’t it?! If I choose to remain connected to her, or all that other garbage, then that is my truth for today. If I choose to let it go, it is already done. No more stuckness sucking the life out of my soul. I am free to love or to leave, regardless of time, space, and substance.”
Another push. “Am I a belief too?”
A briefer pondering pause. “I choose to believe you are! And I be-lieve that at some point tonight, I will be-leaving you for yet more mind-blowing experiences in love lost and life gained.”
“Good luck with that.”
No pause. “Luck? Luck? We don’t need no stinkin’ luck.” David smiled even at his lack of originality, since, it was now apparent to him, nothing he could say was original anyway! The mental programming was persistently present. The Beliefs still floated around in his head. But, at last, now he KNEW about them. He no longer WAS the Beliefs. He was beyond belief. He had glimpsed the breaking of the belief barrier. Belief bubbles began to burst by the billions. And in the remaining empty space, Awareness. Aware. Awake and Aware. A. Where. Now. Nice.
David finally broke the free-floating silence by asking, “By the way, do you remember last night when you said that you were going to give me a Christmas present? Not to be greedy or anything, but what was my present going to be, by the way?”
Walton smiled and said, “You are, at this Now moment, living fully in the midst of that very Present. The Presence of the entire Universe lives within you and yet without you! What more could a person ask?? I gave you the Present moment.”
“Hmmm. I can live with that. As a matter of fact, I DO live with that, don’t I!?!”
Walton, acknowledging the peaceful presence of a new incarnation, nodded in agreement. “Want some more hot mocha chocolate?”
Yes, of course, there it was, all along. Hot mocha chocolate. Hot mocha chocolate was truth. Hot mocha chocolate was god. It was soul medicine for whatever ailed a person. Hot mocha chocolate was reality, really. All it needed was a few marshmallows on top. And within. And without. Or not. Ah, the sweet mystery of Sanctuary, found in a cup of hot mocha chocolate.
*****