Book Excerpts

Chapter 4

For I was afraid Thou wouldst hear me too soon, and
heal me at once of my disease of lust, which I wished to
satiate rather than to see extinguished.
—U.A. Asrami, “The Experience,”
The Psychic International, May 1963

I Cannot Tell You What It Is

Letting go of Mary felt almost like letting go of life, my most precious possession, but at last I had made an honorable decision and I was living it through. I could not go back, but I didn’t know where I was going. This fear of the unknown was intense and pervaded my being. After some time had passed, however, a new spark appeared within me. I was grateful to be alive, so grateful that I lost all fear, even the fear of death.

I recognized the spark: it was not new; it had always been there. It was the spark of joy and self-reliance. I believe this spark was what the Buddha must have been referring to when he said, “‘neath Heaven above and the earth below, I am the world’s most honored one.” I had surrendered to life, expecting that it would crush me, and was surprised to find that it nourished me. I had been resisting my unfoldment, and now I embraced it wholeheartedly.

I saw myself clearly. Everything I had been doing up to then was
for the purpose of projecting a favorable image. Oh, how funny and smooth and witty and wonderful I was! yet I was not really any of those things. I remembered myself as a young child, running through the meadows, feeling good inside and out, at one with nature and myself. I had no fear in me then. I could see and feel the good in each person, each thing, and each situation. Instead of focusing on myself, I focused on what was around me. I wanted to help and to comfort everyone I came in contact with.

In those childhood years, innocence translated into certainty: I did not doubt myself; I did not suffer from inner confusion. The good in me instinctively cried out for expression, and I acted unerringly on it every day. As I walked the streets of New York City, pondering the meaning of my life, I saw that the real me underneath the role-playing playboy was a different me; the real me was truly expansive, free of the enormous weight of maintaining an image. Life is wonderful when we stop associating who we are with the mask we have been wearing.

This second birth by its force and energy crowded out and transformed my old existence. The positive process of transformation absorbed and thrilled me. The manure of old habits fed new and healthy habits. I understood what Christ meant about being converted and becoming again like a little child. We cannot open to the flow of life and feel the joy of living as long as we are caught up in maintaining a role or depending on others for our happiness. When we let go of the role and the dependency, rebirth takes place spontaneously.

Although my central issue was learning to live without Mary, a subtle change crept into all aspects of my life. I stopped worrying. I scaled way back on everything that was getting in the way of finding out who I was so that I could see the good parts poking through. I stopped smoking, a habit I have never again started. Since I was consuming three packs of cigarettes a day, this was an amazing turnabout, and it was extremely difficult in the early stages. I think I was able to do it because I was determined to show the advertising companies that they didn’t have power over me. I started taking Hatha Yoga lessons with a Hindu yoga instructor, and I practiced yoga for two hours a day.

I stopped eating meat, not because of spiritual principles but quite naturally, because meat no longer appealed to me. I started doing regular fasts. I lost thirty-five pounds. I found I could easily forego meals without missing them. I stopped my heavy drinking—content with a glass of wine at dinner or a beer at social gatherings. I went out less and less; although I still enjoyed meeting friends at bars occasionally, I had lost my taste for noise and nightlife.

I developed the ability to listen. I no longer got bored, and I could listen to even the longest ramblings or conversations with interest and compassion. I was asked to many dinner parties where before my modus operandi had been to avoid the plain or physically ugly people and to associate with glittering people who titillated me.

My strange, emerging new being was acutely sensitive to the sadness of the homely, the outcasts, and the ignored ones who sat apart, hoping they would be included. Consciously, I often singled out the most distressed person I saw and spent the evening with her or him, asking and listening and saying nothing about myself. The part of me that increasingly yearned to be good and to be of service was insistent, so I listened and followed and acted. I don’t know if I helped or made anyone less lonely. I only know that I found satisfaction and peace in this action.

My dependence on women and my need to control them nearly vanished. I found peace inside, and it gave me a wonderful sense of completeness: nothing was lacking; I had everything I needed. I spent more and more evenings at home, and when I did go to parties, I usually left alone. I was more honest with myself, and it changed the quality of my relationships. I still dated from time to time, but now I focused more on the friendship than on the sex. The spark inside had become a tiny flame of emerging light, and in it I saw clearly the waste and sorrow of using women for my own gratification.

I was reminded of this at the oddest times. Once when I had gone back to my companion’s apartment for a drink, I was assailed by awareness of what I was doing. Both of us knew that ‘having a drink’ meant spending the night, and soon after we arrived, she changed into a silky negligee. As if by rote, we began intimacies.

Suddenly, I stood up, put on my clothes, and left a very bewildered
young woman sitting on the sofa. Part of what I experienced at this time may have been a result of the dramatic decrease in my alcohol consumption. The depressant aura shrouding my consciousness had lifted. And there was something else: my faith in God had been rekindled. Something higher than myself had become real to me. I could feel a vibration of goodness in me that touched everything I did.

I was flooded with physical energy and a sense of goodness and self-sufficiency. The energy begged to be used—nothing was too much for it. Just try me, it said. I remember moving all my furniture by myself from my Greenwich Village flat to a fifth floor walkup in the 90s on York Avenue. By myself I carried a sofa weighing over three hundred pounds up five flights of narrow stairs.

Even my professional life had been touched by this wonderful grace. I had always had a good eye for detail and a sense of curiosity, and that made camera work a natural occupation. Framing a picture, however, which required imparting the correct sense of tension and proportion, had always been difficult for me. My friend and boss Bob Gaffney, who had an impeccable eye for framing, had always corrected my compositions before we shot. I was surprised to discover that framing had become easy; it felt natural. I didn’t have to struggle to get the right perspective. The elements fell into place effortlessly, and my pictures were excellent. Bob noticed. He was quite surprised, and from then on he left me on my own in this respect.

During this time we made a documentary called Rooftops of
New York, which was about people’s lives on their rooftops in the
summer when they didn’t have enough money to go to the beaches.

Bob McCarty and I wrote the screenplay, and Bob Gaffney did the
camera work. We made it funny. By hiring a lot of starving actors
and using leftover film, we were able to make the film for three
thousand dollars. We also got Lionel Hampton to compose a song for us, free, because he liked us. The film was to open in New York City with The Guns of Navarone, guaranteeing it a huge audience.

Unfortunately, the New York opening was halted: we had not shot
the film union. We couldn’t afford union scale. We had spliced a
union seal into the leader of the film, but a meticulous projectionist
discovered the splice and prevented the opening, limiting the film’s
exposure. Even so, Rooftops was nominated for an Academy Award, and we spent an exciting few months. We attended the ceremonies and heard that the film had been well received. The buzz was that our lack of exposure had cost us the Oscar.

After Rooftops, another college friend, Billy Mellon of the Mellon
family, asked me to help with camera work and production for a film he was shooting in Peru at the headwaters of the Amazon River. The film was a documentary on the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, which was providing free medical care to the Indians. We lived in the Amazon for two or three months, working on the film.

It was a great experience. The director was Erica Anderson, who
had won an Academy Award for an earlier film on Albert Schweitzer. While we were on location, I wandered around and shot film on my own, just for the experience and the fun of it. Back in New York, Dede Allen, who went on to win several awards for her film editing, cut the film, and she taught me how to edit.

We discovered that we had no footage of jungle and birds and people walking around the streets. Since that’s what I had shot for my own pleasure, they used my footage in the final cut. I was thrilled. I also saved the day with my childhood talent for mimicry by making all the bird sounds myself. Any ornithologist who saw that film probably went crazy. Erica had done another film about a Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti, run by Larry Mellon, Billy Mellon’s father. She had shot some dramatic before-and-after footage, showing the transformation of a snake pit mental institution into a modern hospital. Instead of writhing on a muddy floor, the patients were cleaner and calmer, thanks partly to a new drug called Thorazine.

SmithKline heard about the film and requested it. Guess who arrived with the film? Their old employee, Locke. They were all over me. “Hi, Locke. How are you?” “We’ve missed you, boy!” All those old friends who had claimed to be disenchanted with SmithKline and on their way out the door after me were still there. I was king of the roost for a day. It was satisfying. I had taken a big risk when I left; I had followed my instincts and now I was doing a job I loved and living the way I wanted to live.

I also went to Chile to do a documentary. I was freelancing and was hired as a cameraman/producer to do a film there about the piqueñéros, a dying breed of gold miners like the character Humphrey Bogart portrayed in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. A Chilean couple, Silvia and Raphael Vega-Querat, were funding the project. The Querats took a liking to me. “You must be our guest,” they insisted.

The social life that revolved around the Querats was stimulating. In the evenings, they left their doors wide open, and many artists came by, among them the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda. No one even thought of eating until nine or ten at night, and the festivities went on until at least one in the morning, when people would go home or pass out or fall asleep. This went on every night. There was great camaraderie and spirit. It seemed to me like my fantasy of Paris during the thirties.

My camera assistant and I shot some footage, and I think it would have been a great little film, but the Querats ran out of money and we couldn’t finish it.

Also during this time, I was called upon to speak publicly, a situation that before had terrified me. I was not afraid. I felt no need to prepare. My words emerged effortlessly, and people said my talks were humorous and profound.

Emerging from the darkness felt strange and wonderful. As my depression lifted, the light inside was radiant. It filled me. This spiritual awakening was as close to a conversion experience as I can imagine. I remember pinching myself and whispering, My God, is this really happening?

I read voraciously, searching for some clue to the wonderful thing that was happening to me. I inhaled books on Eastern religion, finding it less cluttered than Western religion. I read my first book on Zen, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps. I found that I easily understood the concept of koans and the strange paradoxical dialogues of the old Zen masters. I laughed helplessly at passages
that friends found humorless.

On a Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum, I discovered the joy to be found in works of art. I had been dead to the world of art, but now it so captivated me that I could spend thirty minutes in front of one painting, absorbed in the scene and in the sense of wonder that it touched in me.

As I sat in front of a Corot landscape, I wept at its beauty and serenity. My life had become like that painting. Who could I thank for the priceless gifts I was finding in my heart and in the world around me? I started going to Russian Orthodox services. Amidst the incense and chanting, I thanked God and asked what I had done to deserve this wondrous state. I no longer needed external stimuli. My pace of living slowed. I dropped my activities, one by one, and sought solitude. I looked forward to returning home alone and eating alone.

Phone calls or unexpected guests were tolerated interruptions to a strange new sense of centeredness that I knew must be nourished. My aloneness became precious. I was fully aware of myself and my surroundings for the first time since childhood. I spent evenings browsing in my room as if it belonged to a stranger, humming to myself, joyful, stopping occasionally to look at a picture or a book. I felt complete, whole. My old black-and-white world had transformed into a Technicolor marvel. Situations that had previously provoked fear or irritation felt perfectly comfortable. I was happy. Whether I was with someone or alone, I was not lonely.

It made little difference to me what I did or where I went. I acted on my whims as a child would, unafraid of the future. One day I stood in the rain for an hour to get tickets to a show that I didn’t really care to see just because I felt like standing in the rain.

I was conscious always of a new essence within, which eliminated worry and fear and revealed the deep significance of the most normal objects, people, and situations.

Later in my life, some of the religious literature I read made me recognize that what had happened to me during those last months
in New York City was profound, but it seemed pretentious to call it spiritual. I felt utterly natural; what I experienced was something so ordinary and obvious that it is hard to describe in a meaningful way. I had been thirsty, and suddenly I was a fish in a vast expanse of water. Can a fish say its thirst has been quenched? A fish has no conception of thirst.

The experience of this particular state lasted for quite a long time. In fact, it has never completely gone away, but it has never again been as full as it was at that time, so full that it seemed to be emanating from the pores of my skin.

I wanted others around me to know and understand what I was feeling, but I was afraid they wouldn’t and did not dare try to explain lest it go away. But my demeanor expressed everything.

Friends asked me what was different. Had I taken happy pills? they wanted to know. Some attributed the change to yoga and took up
the practice themselves, hoping it might be the key. Yoga was not the key. It seemed to me that a mysterious and delightful Visitor
had come to stay in the house of my life, bringing grace and joy and
peace I had never imagined could exist.

—Locke Rush