The Pilgrim's Digress

Rosy air hushed o’er soaring ancient mountain peak silence dawning in the high country. Highway 395 nestles in the valley below. Cold snow slithers down steep canyon cliff face and lonely secret valleys. Air is soft here in high desert; the scraggy shooting peaks above me—Whitney, Lone Pine, Williamson—reach into sky and breathing winds don’t blow as much as heave with tidal oceanic power to splash and flood the dry tree line sloping below. Grandest most rugged and highest mountain range in the lower 48 above; across the long Owens River Valley hunched and rolled the Alabama mountains; glistening and sparkling mirror waters of poor shallow Owens Lake streaked under a peeking sun almost humbly requesting permission to rise and glow over this country majesty that had stood proud guarding the earth all through an icy dark star flashed night and could damn well keep watch another thousands nights, but the sun moved carefully and soundlessly and dipped her blessings over all, the peaks warmed in her offerings and let her pass overhead like golden flocks of birds. Further south stretched the rock silence of Death Valley, and north ran mountain ranges and river valleys and sleeping voices of gnarled desert ranch folk and ghosts of Paiute and Shoshone tribes feasting on prophecies and whispering philosophies with lizards and hawks and yelping coyotes rummaging in underbrush. Morning clouds blossomed pink and orange and hovered o’er the vast country bestowing delicate goodness and light. I tread softly, Ramsay bounded and spied movement and plots everywhere, and scurried around desert shrub and mottled stone.

I’d driven up the morning before from home Sonoma County on a minor pilgrimage to the Great Space Center, a 450 acre ranch up the flank of the Whitney range, former residence of spiritual teacher and philosopher Franklin Merrell-Wolff, who passed in 1985. Along highway 12 gathered dark vultures around some small furry prey. One perched himself upon a post, wings spread ceremoniously north, either blessing the kill or announcing the New Avian Kingdom Come to his gathered adherents. The drive took me through Sonoma wine country, rolling soft green hills, golden yellow tinged orange wine grape vineyard leaves fluttering; around the marshy end of Vallejo San Francisco Bay, sluggish waters iron brown; straight shot onto highway 80 rumbling to hometown Sacramento and highway 50 beyond, yellow foothills to alpine forest curves up the gradual west groove of Sierra mountains, white dust snow peaks clear and cold; Echo summit and over into mysteriously quiet and poised eastern flank, wide pooling meadows and snow tinged waters; highway 395 a grand symphony of cavernous and soaring earth, the heavenly emptiness and poise of Mono lake basin, going down, down South into the valley and the arching sheer burst of mountain range this Eastern Sierra so swift and dramatic compared to gradual rolling lift of foothills into forests into mountain towns and finally snow blanketed mountains of the West rising from San Francisco’s golden shore, the wrapping, enveloping Pacific Ocean.

But into the small town of Lone Pine I drove as the sun had long sunk over the ridge line and shadows darkened the desert slope and pooled around the twinkling lights of buildings and windows. The Great Space was still three miles up into that darkness. Slow rumble up a rutted dirt road, I searched for a light, and found none. At one point I passed a tall figure in a tree shrouded driveway, and nearly blind backed up along the narrow road fenced by thick dry bush. Turns out he wasn’t the man I was looking for, Franklin’s granddaughter’s son, Robert. No, this man was standing in the darkness evidently waiting to help me, for I had gotten stuck. After he pointed up the road and mentioned where the guest cottage rested, he watched as my tires spun in the soft pillows of dust. Investigating, he noted I was stuck on a rock. He rustled around his dark dwelling, an airy cabin, and located pickaxe and shovel, and we dug in trying to free the trapped vehicle. Ramsay was whining the whole time, not understanding why, since we’d obviously arrived, she wasn’t allowed out to begin surveys of the land and assessments of security threats. The bodhisattva tried pushing, but the small car just heaved and gave up. I got down underneath and felt the rock, brushed some dirt way, and lifted the thing away. Like any good teacher, the grizzled old guy had simply pointed the way, and I freed the car myself. We finally made it to the cottage, lit the oil lanterns in the rustic two-bedroom house, and settled in with some Irish whiskey and Franklin’s first work, Pathways Through to Space.

Franklin wrote of his transcendental experience from 1936. He realized that what we in our relative consciousness normally think of as have substance, the material of our sensual world (a subjective consciousness over against the “objective world” of things, ponderable matter), is actually empty of Substance, and what we take as emptiness, darkness from the relative standpoint (that which is the empty “stuff” between a conscious subject viewpoint and the things our senses discover “out there”) is fundamentally the deeper real, fullness and light, and the core is the seat of Consciousness itself. When one searches for this self, of course one finds nothing. One is searching for an object, whether gross or subtle. A thing. So one is deluding oneself, as the fundamental source, the holy ground of consciousness, cannot be an object presented to one as subject. This is the relative field. But God is the Absolute. See the difficulty? The writing of this, of course, has no bearing on the truth of the experience conveyed. And I do it no justice. Franklin did say, however, that the Key to his Recognition came when he gave up searching for a subtle object of Liberation, which of course posits that there is something outside of the subjective pole of consciousness to “find”. There was no aim. Freedom is re-cognizing you are free. I suppose another incarnation would be “Christ is within you.” I remember having a minor recognition along these lines, one afternoon looking with great love and desire on a beautiful ocean from Land’s End in San Francisco. The light on the water, the tidal dance, the holy mist gracing the blown Cyprus trees. I suppose I desired to meld with all the beauty, which I took to be forever distant, “out there”, unreachable, and all the more desirable for that impossibility of possessing it, or being possessed by it. It then hit me: I was in that already, it was all around me, standing as I was on a bluff within this our glorious earth, and I smelled the ocean, breathed in the briny perfume. At that point desire dropped away, and only beauty remained.

What dreams spur the flight of the pilgrim? Latin peregrinus, “foreigner”, peregre, “from abroad”, per + ager fundamentally meaning “through field, country”. A pilgrim is one who wanders about, secondarily one making a journey to a shrine or holy place. Think of the peregrine falcon in flight on a hunt. The popular notion of the pilgrimage captured in the image of the hunt: craving the prey, spiritual sustenance, fair enough. What precisely does the pilgrim lack, need, or thinks he needs? In Islam the hajj is one of the religion’s five pillars; the believer should make the trek to Mecca, recreating and celebrating the hejira or “flight” Mohammed made from Mecca to Medina in 622. A more formal component of a Muslim’s spiritual duty, whole families gather at airports to welcome back the sojourner. On the sides of concrete slab houses in Aleppo, Syria, a green spray painted palm tree confirms a resident had undertaken the trip successfully. Adhering to the original notion, pilgrimages are feats of walking. Circumambulating Mount Kailas and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet; on the Camino de Santiago through Europe to the bones of Saint James. Hundreds of hikes girdle the globe, seekers on a mission shuffle thoughtfully in fog and rain and dusty sun. A further question: what is the pilgrim hoping to find at the terminus? Ah, perhaps nothing; the journey commences, endures, ends. Perhaps one prays over relics, holy bones of the saintly departed. Ironic, as the most honest prayer will be answered: yes, you too shall wind up piled bones! I felt no mystic sensation upon arrival. The wild mountainous, cavernous, rivering, meadowing, snow-feathered land was wondrous enough. So I slept.

A rutted two-wheel trail crawls up the Whitney flank toward the canyon, where that late afternoon swirls of misty cloud fog spiced in the yawning, burbled and warped the wind, beckoned to enter. Dog Ramsay and I did, hiking across the already late afternoon shadowed cool of eastern Sierra toward the ashrama built deep in the Tuttle Creek Canyon by Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the last century. A fierce slicing wind roars from the canyon’s bowels. I was Yudhisthira with his dog coming into the gates of heaven, and Indra stood her ground, throwing whorls of sand and dust down from her growling countenance. Returning down the trail, I spy a figure coming up, slowly. It was the grizzled bodhisattva who the previous evening assisted in freeing my car. We met, shook hands. Ramsay begin digging off the trail and wrestling shrubbery branches. The old guy gave me the history of the place, pointing out neighbors and their stories. He knew Franklin’s story, too. Admitted trying to read through his work, but it flummoxed him. He had respect for Franklin, considered him legitimate, but sniffed disdainfully at those he labeled Franklin’s “acolytes.” Who the grizzled bent figure really learned from was Krishnamurti. I concurred. Said he saw/heard Krishnamurti speak of few times.

“Yeah the first time I went down to that place, down there by Santa Barbara”—he waved southward, “Ojai” I said—“and the first time Krishnamurti asked me ‘Why are you here?’ and I thought, huh…so I stayed and listened to him. The next time Krishnamurti asked me the same thing, ‘Why are you here?’ I said I didn’t really know why. So then he says ‘Well then why don’t leave.’ So I did. The third time, two guys I knew wanted to see him. I'd already seen him twice--"

"Yes, like Alan Watts said: once you get the message, hang up. No use putting the phone on an alter--"

"Yeah so these guys didn't have a car. So I drove them down."

"Ah, the Buddhist ferryman making the crossing, taking folks to the other shore--"

"I knew Krishnamurti talked for 45 minutes. So I walked around [whistling as if passing time] and after 45 minutes, there they were just coming out."

After awhile he bade goodbye and started up the trail. To where I couldn’t say.

Late afternoon I got back to the cottage. Ramsay and I had done three long hikes. I’d reread many chapters of Franklin's book during the day as the sun warmed the cottage, gathered Ramsay close and tied her leash to the porch chair when I heard coyotes yelping not too far off. But now the rosy air was cooling. It was only 3:30 in the afternoon. The heater wasn’t working. Prospects were cold leftover lentil salad. What, I’d sit in this rustic cottage and drink until bed? So I packed up and we drove off. On the road again, zooming through fallen darkness to a motel in Bridgeport, three hours north. A blessed life is pilgrimage enough.