Dear Michael:

Letter to Dead Yogi-Buddha Michael Stone

Michael Stone

Dear Michael:

I started and finished a version of this letter many weeks ago. That one was difficult to write and took many weeks, which is unusual as letters more usually move out of my fingers with relative ease. On hindsight I now recognise that my difficulty was that I was gripping onto your death. At the time I didn’t see that I was gripping my ache to understand your death with a stiff mind and frozen fingers, despite all your admonitions against holding onto things tightly.  As you have noted, Jung put it well: the unconscious really is unconscious!

Way back then, after I finished that letter with a sigh of relief, I read it out loud to my partner. It sounded pretty good to me. Not to Yoshiko! In her clear description it was unfair to you in ways I won’t articulate here. Her points were correct and so I tossed out my intention to substack-publish it. Instead I chose to look at it as an object of personal egoic discovery, svadhyaya. It took some time for me to see past that frozen idea to see more clearly my samskara of ice in the face of your death. 

At the time I wasn’t sure that I would return to writing this epistle to you. After all, you are now someone without fingers to hold these electronic words, nor eyes to see them. And yet, as you can see, here I am without any idea of where you are.

Why am I writing this? Perhaps in part because I wanted another go at getting to know me through my relationship to the you that was and to the you that is still alive in your writing and speaking. They both have become alive in my heart and soul. Ah, if only life was really that new age Eckart Tolle ‘woo-woo’ feel good fluffiness. (I can hear you laughing, maybe, at Tolle as a butt for having successfully wooed the shallow woo-woo wooer spiritual wannabes.)

Actually, though, I am here writing mostly because of a couple of peculiar synchronicities that followed my letting go of my grippyness and trash-binning the first draft. And because I recently heard your yogic exploration of the expansion of your experience of depression, and your approach to it has inspired me.

Synchronicities I see as a way the Universe has of suggesting that there is something worth looking at and so they suggest to me that writing to you is to be more than an awareness of a personal craving asking to be let go. And since then, tonight as it so happens, a couple more small synchronicities have kept my fingers tapping away, this time warm and relaxed instead of icy and stiff.

Synchronicity number one was the random Oaxaca Lending Library find of a 2005 anthology of Buddhist essays put together by a fellow Canadian, Melvin McLeod. It is The Best Buddhist Writing 2005, which happens to include a chapter from American writer and Buddhist Natalie Goldberg’s book, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth.

Goldberg has a particular place in my heart because it was through her book Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, which I read out loud to my partner who brought it home from the library by ‘chance’ in 2021, that re-introduced us to Buddhism and from there to the discovery of you.

Thus it was that the two of you began the process of awakening Buddhism to us in a transformative way that we didn’t experience many years prior with our first Buddhist brush. Natalie’s chapter, ‘The Great Mistake’, closes with her cry of pain for the early, premature, death of her teacher, Katagiri Roshi. Wow! What a synchronicity with my earlier effort at crying over your death, even though I was pretending it wasn’t a frozen cry.

Touching Roshi's frailty finally brought him closer to me, unraveled my solid grief. At the end of January I had a painful backache that lasted all day. At midnight in my flannel pyjamas I got up out of bed, went to the window, and looked out at the star-studded clear, cold night sky with Taos Mountain in the distance.

"Where are you? Come back!" I demanded. "We have things to settle." 

I let out a scream that cracked the dark, but one raw fact did not change: nothing made him return, and I was left to make sense of his life—and mine (86).

Tonight this in turn developed into a small connected synchronicity when I went looking for an image of Katagiri Roshi and saw the word ‘controversy’ buried in the search engine’s teaser paragraph. What I found in the link was ‘Beyond Betrayal’. It is Natalie’s interview with Caryl Göpfert about her then recently published book, The Great Failure, in which she explored her painful discovery, several years after his death, that her mentor Katagiri Roshi had betrayed the trust of his Buddhist community by having had sex with some of his students. (McLeod did not include this detail in the intro to the essay he included in the anthology.) Natalie explores ‘trust’ in an interesting and, for me, synchronistic, way:

I studied with Trungpa Rinpoche,

Really, Trungpa? Isn’t that smoke and smile suggesting a word that begins with ‘s’?

and I remember a line in one of his poems that I always pondered. He said, “Don’t trust anyone.” I never felt like this instruction came from paranoia. And then I heard that Suzuki Roshi had said that to Yvonne Rand: “Yvonne, your problem is you trust people. I don’t trust anybody.”

Do I trust enough that man with the strap razor?

I think what they were saying is that when you have this limited idea of trust, you put someone in a box and they have to behave a certain way. So that’s a frozen idea of trust. “Not trusting anybody” means allowing them, moment to moment, to be different [my emphasis].

Michael, I emphasised ‘So that’s a frozen idea of trust’ because today I listened to you in Copenhagen talking about Dante’s Inferno. I didn’t know that the bottommost layer of hell was not comprised of fire and brimstone. Rather it is frozen ice, within which Satan is firmly imbedded and kept there, upside down, by his own efforts.

You elaborate that to be frozen means being dead because the freedom to be in the moment has been removed. Our addictive patterns of reaction are a form of being frozen in a past state. Our fixated stories of the truth of who we or what are the truths of others are is to freeze ourselves and them outside of an alive living life. My first letter was one of freezing you into an image of a story I had created about your death. (For an interesting look at Dante’s frozen Satan, upside down in hell creating his own frozen lake, see ‘Dante and Satan’s Hell: From The Lecture Series: Why Evil Exists’.)

The second original synchronicity arose from the Japanese translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius that Yoshiko has in her library and has read many times.

Yoshiko recently picked it up again because she has become fascinated with the overlap between Aurelius’s stoic meditations and Buddhist and yogic principles. (I am a huge fan of Epictetus and have seen this overlap since 2021’s deeper discovery of Buddhism. For example, see Enchiridion. For example: “VIII: Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”)

At the time of my first draft of this letter Yoshiko had just read Aurelius’s meditation on dying young or old. Paraphrased from her informal translation: ‘To die young or to die old is of no particular meaning because the universe is infinite and so short and long have no bearing or foundation’. (From the Gutenberg Project I found this old translation of Meditation XXXI:

How short the time is from the generation of anything, unto the dissolution of the same; but how immense and infinite both that which was before the generation, and that which after the generation of it shall be. All things that thou seest, will soon be perished, and they that see their corruptions, will soon vanish away themselves. He that dieth a hundred years old, and he that dieth young, shall come all to one.

(And, too funny, today I talked with a Mexican woman who told me that her grandfather died at the age of one hundred.)

I find this interesting because my first letter to you began as my reaction to your ‘premature’ death in 2017 of an accidental fentanyl overdose. At the time I didn’t know it was actually frozen story that I was writing, which was the essence of one of Yoshiko’s critiques of that effort. Up until then I hadn’t thought of writing to you because you came to be my teacher in 2021, four years after your death. We were first introduced to you via a library copy of Awake in the World: Teachings from Yoga and Buddhism for Living an Engaged Life in a pre-death edition of this wonderful book. When we bought the book we read the updated bio with shock. 

The initial thought of writing to you came up in the fall of 2022 after I moved from reading your essays to listening to you talks. That happened some time after I had settled down after six months of covid refugee nomadism across Mexico and northern Spain.

With your voice I began to feel with some intensity the cry of pain. And instead of feeling that pain before returning to the breath, as you so eloquently and carefully elucidate, I began to wrestle with the why, why, why! Your words have expanded the life we are living in this world and you were no longer here living with us. And with that mental ice-block I forgot the impermanence of all things, and began the creation of the ‘What if’ samskara that consumed and cramped my writing fingers for so long in that first letter.

And this time as I write I began to smile, and even laugh a little, as the thought entered ‘me’ – I didn’t think it, I don’t think – if I would take the opportunity to strike your coffin with an open hand and yell out ‘Alive or dead?’ (“Alive or dead” is a reference to a famous Zen koan called, “A Condolence Call”, which goes:

Daowu and Jianyuan went to a house to offer condolences. Jianyuan struck the coffin with his hand and asked, "Alive or dead?"

Daowu said, "I'm not saying alive, I'm not saying dead.”)

In recent days we listened to you describe with a group on one of your intensives your struggle with an expanding depression that had grown so big that your techniques of meditation and yoga were no longer adequate to the task. And you shared your surprise and your openness to the possibility that maybe medication might be a solution, that genetics might be a contributor to the problem. You shared your mother’s history with a depression that also grew, and that other family members have struggled with it as well. And you were open and clear in looking at this in the Buddhist way of this is my experience with a curiosity and puzzlement about going forward with it. This was so inspiring to me! Your open curiosity about something so difficult, as an experience of the now as it is. And this, more than the synchronicities, was likely the reason I wrote this epistle. 

“Alive or dead?” Both. Neither. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Guy

P.S.: Well, Life, the Universe, or whatever ‘It’ is out beyond this limited mind with its limited perceptions, has Its sense of humour in full swing. As I was finishing the above, I opened The Best Buddhist Writing 2005 again and read about the place of the tea ceremony (chado)  in Japan as a quintessential expression of the Japanese arts’ aesthetic. ‘Have a cup of Tea’  by John Daido Loori is a nice read. After living with a Japanese woman for 5 years, I’m not sure that Loori hasn’t ‘frozen’ the Japanese Zen ethic that disavows the greater reality of personal disembodiment that is made manifest with the nearly daily death by train suicide that is an accepted part of Japanese life. Regardless of Loori's expressed idealisation of the Japanese Zen ethic, his essay finished with a delightful synchronicity that extends the Goldberg ‘trust’ synchronicity from above. Loori wrote:

If I were asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it is trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow hair. It grows (p275).