Contemplating responsibility

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This is in part a continuation of my reply to the last comment.

I’m not a “guru” in the stereotypical sense of the word. I don’t jet around the world in fancy robes making appearances, and I don’t earn cash for smooth-spoken trash. I couldn’t lay claim to divinity without either giggling, or throwing up. If worshipped, I promise to run away. I have no secret teaching and no special initiation to offer or withhold.

But there’s another, not so off-kilter grandiose, meaning of the word: teacher. That I am, even if I don’t use the word. If I don’t look at that, and think hard on that, my blindness can foster a metamorphosis towards the ugly form of the word.

This is a slippery thing for me to grasp. I don’t feel that I’m all that different from those I mentor. I call them friends, because that’s what they seem to be to me.

But, that word obscures the fact that I am not just a friend to them. I see my friends as they describe themselves to me, as persons who struggle with personal and spiritual issues. They see me as someone who has seen a way beyond some of these same issues, as someone to whom their happiness — and in some ways perhaps even their survival– is bound.

The extent of this power differential is a recent revelation for me. I had understood in a general sense that it existed. I’ve held conversations, for example, about why any sort of romantic involvement was forever off-limits between myself and those I mentor. Still I hadn’t seen the depth of the issue until a few weeks ago I understood that a friend wasn’t really free to speak his mind with me.

This isn’t a problem with the disciple, as I know gurus (pejorative sense) everywhere have argued in similar situations. This “problem” isn’t even really a problem. It’s an inevitable part of the learning process. I never argued calculus or Russian grammar with my teachers, because I knew they knew far more than I did. The circumstances my friends are in (“friend”, defective as it is, is still a good word, expressive of aspiration, if not perfectly of reality) is analogous to the position of a calculus student, but much messier. As a calculus student I never looked to my professor as an authority on existence itself.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. And just as this isn’t a problem, but a fact, there isn’t a solution, but only a responsibility. I have a responsibility to strive to be aware of my friends’ circumstances, to strive to address the imbalances, to make space for independence, to recommit myself to serve my friends — understanding that, short of abuse, I am not free to walk away unless I am sent away, and that when I am sent away it’s not mine to linger a moment longer.

Perhaps the great failure of the gurus of the dharma religions is that. The student is expected to swear fealty to the teacher and to assume a duty of service to the teacher. In fact it is the teacher who ought be taking the oaths. Unless power is a burden, it is a poison.

Looking at it from another angle: Yes, I’ve known the “Great Aha!”, and it has in some sense irrevocably changed me. But extrapolating from there that I or anyone else could be an infallible enlightened being without the capacity to do wrong is bullshit of the sort that lets escapists indulge in fantasy and sociopaths indulge in excuses. I have a body. My mind can and had been fogged through illness and lack of sleep. I often lack the material knowledge to make the right decision. And try as I might to be aware of them, I’m as neurologically prone to cognitive errors as the next human equipped with a few pounds of wetware between my shoulders. I can, without a doubt, make errors, even devastating errors. The ideas expressed by the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, that one who has experienced theosis, while no longer capable of mortal sin (i.e., the rejection of God) remains capable of sins of the flesh (no, not how we use it, colloquially, to mean sex, but rather, that living creatures have physical limits and physical needs which can cause errors in judgment) are, in my opinion, much more accurate than the grandiose claims of the worst of the East.

I don’t want to be haunted by a burden of perfection that I cannot live up to. The only way to escape such a burden is to work diligently to mitigate the power imbalance between myself and those friends I mentor.

 

Dissecting Eckhart Tolle

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Last night a friend (who has an excellent grasp of facial expressions, tone of voice, and other intangibles) wanted to watch and critique an Eckhart Tolle interview. I’ve long seen Tolle as a classic New Age spiritual profiteer, and I knew my friend did not like him either. So I thought the night would involve shared snark. I was wrong.

The first thing my friend and I both noticed was how he was trying to suppress expression of any emotion. You see this often among persons who try to present themselves as spiritual. For some reason they equate lack of emotion with inner peace, or at least they think that by presenting an emotionless front, it will look like inner peace to others. But it doesn’t. It looks like someone trying to be deadpan. What leaks out– the emotions that can’t be fully suppressed –is always very interesting.

The next thing we both noticed was the hollowness of his story. When people recount actual events, their accounts have a solidity to them. Surfaces are hard or soft, smooth or rough. Temperatures are warm or cold, the wind blows, or not. Sounds are loud, or quiet, high or low. Authentic memories have a kind of crisp certainty at the core, even after the passage of years has caused some of the details to be forgotten.

Eckhart Tolle’s account had few of these attributes. Where it did have these attributes, they pointed to something other than what it was presented to be. In particular, what Tolle described of his spiritual transformation sounded to my friend — who grew up with a bipolar parent — instead like someone emerging from a period of depression.

What I found incredible about his account was his dismissive statement about not remembering anything more about what transpired on that evening. I could sooner forget my name than I could forget any part of what transpired in my life 30 years ago. My memories are so powerful that I may as well be experiencing it when I reflect on it, and I cannot keep my voice from trembling when I talk of it in detail.

At some point in the tape not long after his account we were interrupted by a phone call, and I froze the recording. When we came back to it my friend noted about the freeze frame that Tolle’s face, despite his best effort at deadpan, didn’t look calm and wise. It looked, she said, like a man who had just been told his father has cancer. Tolle’s sadness was leaking through.

Watching the leaks, both of us wondered to what extent Tolle believes his own story. We arrived at a consensus that it had started as a knowing deception– an exaggeration, more likely, in his opinion, since he had emerged from depression, and since he does draw extensively from the world’s wisdom literature (even if he often doesn’t understand what he’s borrowing from it). I suspected he was not alone in formulating the deception. In my mind’s eye I imagined him sitting around a kitchen table with other people, people of the same ilk I once knew from the music industry. They alternately flattered his wisdom, dismissed the seriousness of the misrepresentation, and promised to make him a successful self-help author 1. Tolle consented to their plans, never expecting the degree to which their scheme would “succeed”.

We both think that Tolle feels trapped in his situation. We also thought that at times he’s begun to believe some of the fabrications (cognitive dissonance being an awkward thing to live with). But he is not an entirely unwilling participant, nor is he unaware that the whole thing is a scheme. Watch his expressions as he speaks about the money he has made. He is more emotionally expressive, more animated, about this topic than any other topic under discussion. This is the subject that really matters to him. And, you will see, near the end of the discussion of his finances, that he can’t quite manage to suppress a smirk.

We couldn’t entirely ignore the content — what he said — of “the teachings”. What stood out to me was how very poorly he understood some of the concepts he had taken from the world’s wisdom literature. It is true, as he appropriates to himself in his books, that we don’t really have words for spiritual concepts, and that it is important not to get bogged down in conventional interpretations of the necessarily inadequate language used to describe spiritual concepts.

But, as my friend pointed out, if your take on the Biblical snippet “the peace that passeth all understanding” is that you had peace and you didn’t understand it, then there is a hell of a lot more that you well and truly do not understand.2,

He conflates being in the now with not planning. Equating the mystical now with a failure to think ahead or analyze the past is dangerous hogwash. The now of mysticism is not the now of shortsightedness or stupor. The now of mysticism is the now of the aha!, where all things come together in a fully present, wordless, understanding. Like all moments of sudden insight, it is the endpoint of intensive, usually years long, inquiry. Unless you dig deep, into the nature of truth, into how others in the past understood truth, and into one’s own character and motives illumined by the light of past actions, there is no hope that all the pieces will come together in a Great Aha! Compassion, too, is only empty sentiment without intent, and intent is necessarily about the future. Life without planning and without looking back is a blinded and chaotic life, not an insightful and creative one.

It’s very bad advice like this that makes Eckhart Tolle’s teaching harmful, both spiritually and materially. And it is destructive ideas like this which motivate me to blog.

I felt pity for the man. He is lost, sad, and terribly alone. Watching him I am not inspired by his wisdom. But I am, almost, inspired to call Adult Protective Services to report that someone, somewhere, is exploiting the mentally ill.

Unfortunately, it’s here where we had to turn off the video and part. Perhaps in a few days my friend and I will have a chance to finish watching the tape. I don’t want to finish it by myself, because this particular friend is my go-to source for reading another person’s character. I know I don’t spot half of what she easily catches and can point out.  I simply couldn’t do it justice alone.

As my friend was leaving I said “It’s a shame I won’t be able to blog about any of this,” thinking that such a critique of the man lacked the discourse about ideas necessary to make it respectable. But later I thought “It’s a blog post, not a formal essay. I can write almost anything I want in a blog post.” And so I have.

Of course evaluating intangibles like this is chockablock with subjective interpretation. And so I invite my readers (including my friend, who I know reads this blog) to look at the video and add their own observations about Eckhart Tolle in the comments.

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1 After writing this I learned his wife is a marketing professional. This is not proof of culpability, but it’s a fit with the type of person I hypothesize is behind the Eckhart Tolle phenomenon.

2 “The peace that passeth all understanding” refers to a peace that cannot be described using language, or comprehended using conventional thought. It nonetheless is a peace that is entirely understood in a Great Aha! moment. Unless you know that kind of understanding, you can’t know that kind of peace. Tolle here by his words demonstrates that he knows neither.

This site will be down for a server move

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My hosting company is going out of the hosting business, which means this website is moving some time before December 1st (the deadline). So if you look, and its not here, look again in a few hours to (worst case scenario) few days. It will be back.

Frequently Asked Questions about December 2012

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Q: What does the Mayan calendar predict about December 2012?

A: The Mayan calendar predicts that you need to buy a new calendar. At least that’s what both living Mayans and academics who specialize in the Mayan calendar have to say about it.

Q: But if both Mayans and archaeologists say this, who is saying it predicts the end of the world?

A: The New Age movement. Its leaders think actual Mayans and people who know how to read the calendar have gotten it all wrong. Something special is going to happen, they say, and we won’t actually need to buy a new calendar.

Q: Will the world come to an end next month?

A: It depends on who you ask and when you asked it.

The original story was that Earth ChangesTM were going to destroy civilization, or maybe even everything everywhere.But that provoked ridicule and a really bad Hollywood movie. Even worse, if you’re doomed, why would you waste your final days attending expensive weekend seminars with New Age gurus who teach that you’re doomed?

So December 2012 was transformed. Instead of doom the ancient calendar now says that the old consciousness will end and we will experience a cosmic Ascension at the winter solstice.

Q: But wait a minute! Aren’t dangerous earth changes actually happening? The climate is changing much faster than expected, and warming could wipe us out (though in the next century, not the next month).

A: They don’t mean those kinds of earth changes. Those are evidence based changes, and New Age gurus hate evidence just as much as fundamentalists and corporate shills. These Earth ChangesTM  mean that the earth will suddenly flip upside-down. It might be caused by a dream one guy had about 60 years ago. Or it might be  because a super secret invisible planet no one has ever seen will come out of nowhere and sideswipe the earth.

The only evidence we will have that the super secret planet exists is telepathy. That’s the kind of hard evidence that satisfies the people who think the world, instead of the calendar year, is ending.

Q: That’s a little too farfetched for me. I can see why many New Agers would rather see it as a time of Ascension. But what exactly does Ascension mean?

A: That’s the beauty of Ascension. Nobody really knows. Unlike Earth ChangesTM, it is forever and always evidence free.

Q: But wouldn’t I notice if the morning after the solstice I’m my same old confused and grumpy self?

A: No, that would simply mean you weren’t spiritually advanced enough to Ascend.

Q: You mean we’re not all going to Ascend?

A: Originally it was going to be everyone. But if axe murderers and saints alike were going to ascend, why bother attending expensive weekend seminars with New Age gurus who talk about Ascension?

So now Ascension only applies to those spiritually advanced enough to ascend (probably because of all of the work they’ve put into weekend seminars). The rest of us will just have to make do.

Q: Oh. Now I get it. Earth ChangesTM are the New Age version of the Tribulations, and Ascension is the New Age version of the Rapture, right?

A: Shhhhhhh! No one is supposed to notice that.

–

The  words “Earth Changes”  aren’t really trademarked. But the way they are used, and by whom,  they ought to be.

The Raw Edge of Compassion

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Photo by Theen. Licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

I’ve been living on the raw and jagged edge of compassion, where “tenderness” becomes a double entendre.

The demands on me — present, immediate past, and immediate future — are nearly beyond what I can imagine myself doing. For the past five weeks, until just a few hours ago, a close friend for whom I am durable power of attorney for healthcare had been in the hospital. As anyone in America who has ever had a family member in the hospital knows, you have to do battle just to get the patient minimally acceptable care. Couple that with the necessity to reassure and comfort and otherwise do what friends and family properly do, and then add all one’s other responsibilities which go on as always, and a five week hospitalization will drain one as little can.

One of those responsibilities that go on regardless of my circumstances has been my prayer bead business. Setting up the new website has been delayed. So too has a series of pendulums (my nod to the New Age crowd I often skewer here, since religious tolerance doesn’t mean much if it only applies to the people you agree with). Production of my new artisan series of copper rosaries has slowed.

But one thing could not be neglected. It was a very special copper rosary, a rosary for my elderly mother to give to her childhood friend when they meet this month, possibly for the last time in their lives. I knew it wasn’t simply another item made for a relative. It was destined to be a statement of love, a testament to the eternal nature of friendship, and that I had to get it done in time regardless of my other duties. So I worked at it at every opportunity, even to wiring the beads at my friend’s hospital bedside.

Similarly (though a much less labor intensive task) I had an order for a rosary bracelet intended as a gift for someone with only weeks to live. That too demanded that I find the time, and I did.

I don’t live alone, and this has taken a toll on the love of my life, my sweetheart and companion — a small green rescue parrot. Parrots are among the most intelligent creatures to ever walk the face of this earth: similar to chimps and dolphins, the intelligence of a parrot is comparable to that of a three to six year old child. Peri had been severely abused and neglected, so much so that when I got her from the rescue group I did not think she would live. I vowed to give the emaciated, weak, and frightened creature in front of me the best life I could for her remaining time. Her “remaining time” has turned out to be three and a half years and still going strong.

But she has problems. She continues to struggle with symptoms that, in a human, would be labeled PTSD. And she lays too many eggs, which can – and has — led to egg binding, a dangerous, often fatal, condition. I’ve had to make a special effort during the slices of time available to me to interact with and reassure my feathered companion. And my late night returns from the hospital has meant she’s gotten enough extra light to trigger more egg laying. A week ago she struggled to lay a rubbery egg for almost three hours (a dangerous length of time). This week I’ve pushed as much calcium as I could into her diet, hoping that the next egg — they lay multiple eggs, separated by a few days each– will be firmer and much less difficult to pass.

All of this fades to insignificance before the next responsibility in front of me, now that my friend is home. A few years ago I was asked to join a tenant organizing drive in my building which, though urgently needed, was not undertaken in good faith. To make a long story short, my fellow organizers, when their dreams of money and personal aggrandizement began to collapse, turned on me. It was ugly, and it was painful. I certainly never intended to revisit tenant politics here.

But now management has effectively banned air conditioning from this, a poorly ventilated high rise for the elderly and disabled, starting next year.

The policy is murderous. Every person in this building is, by definition, at severe risk of heat injury, and more than a few (myself included) have breathing issues. Fans are nearly useless due to the very poor air exchange in this building. The building’s wall of west facing windows functions like a greenhouse in the afternoon light. Even if persons here recognized they needed to cool off, many of them could not get to a cooling center because wheelchair users need to give 24 hours notice to the special transportation agency in order to arrange a van ride. for the bedridden, there is nowhere to go.

Few if any persons living here, living as we do on tiny social security checks, have the means to purchase one of the expensive and inefficient floor air conditioner models management will still permit (and management certainly knows this as we must report our income yearly to management to qualify for a rental subsidy). The local Agency on Aging has informed management that they have no funds to assist the over 100 affected tenants with the purchase of such air conditioners, to no avail. Moving isn’t an option given the shortage of housing in general and the near absence of accessible housing in particular.

People will die here next year. As the only tenant, to my knowledge, with organizing skills and who has not been compromised, I have no choice but to take up the task of organizing again.

I have described all this not in order to rant, or to get sympathy, or to solicit advice. In fact, I know the standard advice dispensed these days to anyone who is worn out from caring for others. It goes something like “You need to take care of yourself first”. Or worse yet, one gets some sort of babble about “codependency”.

If you’ve heard this sort of advice so often that you no longer hear the underlying message, let me translate it into plain English. The usual advice is: “Take care of yourself, the individual, the ego called you, because the individual is always better and more important than community, than the society we live in. Snip the threads that connect you to others. Do not sacrifice, unless of course you can get something out of it for yourself like praise and attention and money and power. Do unto yourself what you would manipulate others to do unto you, if only you knew any others in this fragmented culture of isolated individuals. Suckers and sick minds sacrifice. Healthy people grab all the goodies for themselves and run.”

That’s not wisdom. That’s narcissism.

Suffice to say I am not taking such advice. I prefer to live on the ragged edge of compassion– yes, even though it hurts, even though it may harm me. The quintessential fact of spirituality is sacrifice. It has always been so. It will always be so, no matter how unpopular it is in our age of narcissism, no matter how popular self-centered feel-good counterfeit mysticism may be.

At the center of all things is that which is beyond name or description. When we try nonetheless to name and describe it, so as to point the way to it, we find ourselves putting more or less the same words to it regardless of path. The words I use are wisdom or insight, love and compassion, and justice, or the act of expressing love. These three things are not, as it may seem, three separate principles from which one may pick and choose– they are and remain references to the inseparable and undefinable. Only our language makes them seem to be distinct and separable abstractions.

Love in action then — not mere sympathy, not a warm fuzzy feeling one can keep for oneself, but doing — is the presence of the Divine itself. To omit doing what one is positioned to do and is capable of, to settle merely for that warm fuzzy feeling and a bit of philosophy, is to alienate oneself from the Divine.

This is not to diminish the importance of tactics, which include taking advantage of every moment for rest and replenishment. And only a fool strives to do things that are beyond their capacity. I’m not an astronaut, an engineer, or a brain surgeon, nor am I someone who ambulates. However urgent it may be to apply such skills to a problem, the Divine doesn’t express itself through me in that manner.

But any “tactics” which place my apparent well being above the well being of others, which involve preserving myself and my comfort at the expense of others for the sake of merely preserving myself– those are acts of ego, not of wisdom. I prefer to be nothing, so that Something may shine through me.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be requesting donations, as well as letters and phone calls to various authorities, to help in our battle to keep this building safe for tenants. I know I try to keep money matters out of this blog when it comes to my shop, but I consider this issue to be of a different nature. I’ll try to keep the appeals in the sidebar, so as to not annoy readers with solicitations. And you will be able to follow what’s happening under the category “Keep us cool”.

 

Update on the downtime (and new guest blogging feature)

My predlication for experimental software blew up on me in a big way. When the admin dashboard for this blog stopped working, I attempted to track down the problem. Every time I’d “find” the problem, another problem would surface. Finally, I had the answer — and it wasn’t a good one. Many files and databases had been corrupted (well, quasi-corrupted) because my character encoding had gotten mangled.

What that means for the non-geeks among you  (to give a simplified hypothetical example, though one clearer than the actual problem I had) is that a server might be trying to spell English words in Chinese characters, or vice versa. Systems don’t much like that.

The extent of the enmanglement was that it was easier for me to reinstall everything and then carefully convert a few critical database tables to the correct character set, than for me to try to track down every bit of problem encoding on this machine (which hosts more than one website). Especially since the more I looked the more I found. Too damned much of this machine seems to rely on the database server whose unwise upgrade appears to be at the heart of the problem (I think it was, anyway. I hope. This one was just evil).

All the critical data (users, posts, comments) is intact. You may need to reset your password. I still need to rebuild categories, forms, the menu, and tags.

The one good thing that will emerge from the ruins is that I now have a system in place for  users to submit guest blog posts. They’ll be moderated of course (this being my personal blog and all), though not (necessarily) to prevent disagreement. I won’t approve a blog post arguing for a position I find outright offensive, but mostly I’m looking to exclude spammy things, nasty things, off-topic things (the official topics here being spirituality and also internet privacy), and poorly written things.

As usual, since even my honeypots have honeypots and this is where spammers come to get blacklisted, I allow anonymous guest blogging.

More on the exploitation of mindfulness

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In my investigations on the topic of mindfulness as medical treatment, I ran across a thoughtful article by a Buddhist criticizing MBSR and its relatives. I’d be amiss if I didn’t provide a link to

Meditation as medicine: a critique (opens in new window)

It’s worth the read.

Pain and the exploitation of Mindfulness

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A photo of an emergency room gurney

From a photo at Wikimedia Commons

I started writing this blog post perhaps two weeks ago. It seemed like the kind of subject that warranted some research, some citations to back my position. I collected those citations, and almost began to write the “final” footnoted post last night when I decided to go to bed.

There’s nothing like lying on a gurney in an emergency room (as I am right this moment) with a knee in searing pain, waiting to find out if this sudden pain is a joint infection, to focus one’s mind on how the exploitation of mindfulness meditation as pain control is wrong. I’ll provide the cites, and perhaps lay this argument out more formally, when I’m able to.

The most obvious reason why mindfulness based stress reduction as pain management is wrong is that there is no good evidence it works. The medical center where my doctor works has begun to offer it as such, which is frank malpractice. Pain is real. It can’t be measured, but its consequences can be, and they are life threatening. Persons who are in pain deserve treatment that is as soundly based as what we offer someone who comes in with appendicitis. Anything less is immoral.

But there’s another dimension. Mindfulness is not a universal, religiously-neutral, practice (as its promoters say). It is particular to some schools of Buddhism. It directly clashes with the prevailing religion, Christianity (as it does with the mind exercises I was handed at the window). A central point of mindfulness is being “nonjudgmental” towards one’s own thoughts. Christianity on the other hand recognizes thoughts of sin to be themselves sinful. And the mind exercises evaluate one’s thought stream and make decisions as to whether or not one wants such thinking. Neither of these positions can be temporarily suspended for the duration of a meditation period: judgement is fundamental to these spiritual paths.

While the mind exercises are practiced by a vanishingly small number of persons, the majority of people treated at the medical center (in whose level 1 trauma center I lie) are Christians. Some are nominal Christians who would be unaware of the conflict. Others couldn’t help noticing the clash and, given that they would be making their acquaintance with mindfulness when in a vulnerable state, could be thrown into a personal spiritual crisis by the illusory necessity of Buddhist meditation. Tell me: do you think it constructive to foster spiritual crises in (say) terminal cancer patients? Or do you think, as I do, lying here in pain listening to the moans of broken bodies all around me, that to induce such crises in the suffering is immoral?

That’s just one example of how mindfulness meditation is in actual conflict with existing religious views. I’m sure there are others. While the endpoint of all seeking is the same, paths– and mindfulness is a component of a path– are most certainly not universal.

Then there is the matter of teaching meditation outside of any of the normal structures that exist to support persons when they inevitably bump into the difficult aspects of mysticism — without, even, a guide who has sufficient understanding of the process to properly help. Doctors and psychologists are not inherently qualified as gurus, any more than the reverse is true.

It’s not mere speculation on my part that psychiatry, confronted with some of the difficulties associated with mystical practices, sometimes will go on a diagnosing and prescribing spree that would leave a meditator much worse off. I am the mentor of someone whose story is, essentially, that. He had begun to dabble in occult and mystical techniques that he learned from books. When he ran into difficulties, he had no one to turn to, and psychiatry moved in, almost wrecking his life.

Last for now, but hardly least, is that this is yet another attempt emerging out of new age thinking to sell spirituality at a profit. Most of the time this element is happy to sell spirituality to the befuddled who seek God in overpriced weekend seminars, or to the greedy who seek magic in the case of business seminars. Selling it to the suffering In lieu of effective treatment (and it is “in lieu” as no one has unlimited health care dollars) is especially reprehensible.

I remember a few more points from my notes, but I’m not feeling up to putting more mental effort into this at this time. I’ll almost certainly revisit this at some point when my knee is not on fire.

(corrected to fix some of my iPod’s autocorrects, and to add that I’m at home, miserable but mercifully not infected. I’ll add to this topic when I feel like a human being, and not a bundle of raw nerve fibers, again).

 

The day that never happened

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Please excuse this excessively personal, raw, unpolished, post.

When  events like the tragedy in Colorado occur, I find myself thinking about what, but for an inexplicable interruption, would have been my fate and the fate of anyone who had crossed my path on the day I went to my high school to kill.

It’s not possible to jump headlong into large scale violence. To get yourself to that point, you have to practice at it. Because I had practiced at it, had amped myself up to the point where I was ready to indiscriminately kill, I have a visceral sense of what the experience would be like. Going into a violent situation is a thrill. Adrenaline heightens your senses and lets you, paradoxically, fall into a steely inner calmness, a focus, that certainly at the time was as calm and focused as I was capable of.

My first targets were to be the guidance counselors and the school administration, and so I planned to enter the school from the side entrance nearest the offices.

This meant I had the shop classes to my left, and I would be briefly exposed to anyone coming and going from the Superintendent’s office to my right, people who would have known I wasn’t allowed on campus due to an indefinite suspension. There was a pretty good chance, and I knew it, that I would be stopped from either direction. I wasn’t worried about the administration. Anyone who tried to stop me from that direction would become my first victim.The shop, which would be behind me and to my left, was more of a problem. I had to put enough distance between myself and the shop entrance as I could as quickly as I could.

In my mind’s eye, on the day that never happened, the assistant superintendent tried to stop me, and when he did so I pointed the gun that I had curled a posterboard around for concealment, and I shot.

And from that point, it was a blur, because it was a fight. Fights are always blurs where action happens even faster than adrenaline-infused senses can process. Because fights are blurs, I was rehearsing each step and every option in my mind on the night my life turned in another direction.

In my minds eye, the noise from shooting the assistant superintendent, and firing a few shots at whoever comes out of the shop to investigate, alerts the guidance and discipline offices, who lock their doors. I shoot out the glass-walled offices of the superintendent, shoot several students in the smoking lounge, and walk a short distance down the main hallway of the school, finding locked doors. So I turn around to go to where most of my victims will be found: the gym where a half dozen or more classes were being held, separated only by partitions.

It’s there, while shooting students and teachers at random, that my plan truly breaks down. Because adrenaline only lasts so long, and no matter how explosive my mix of self-pity and rage may have been, the horror of what I am doing begins to edge under my barriers and float over my walls and drip through my filters. To proceed I had to maintain my steely focus, my plan, my cold detachment from the mayhem I was causing. I was losing it.

In my mind’s eye, the end came when one of the girls in the gym, instead of running or hiding or pleading for her life, approached me, asked me what was wrong, and said I was better than this. And so I shot her, viciously, two or three times to try to destroy that tiny sliver of humanity she had injected into my thoughts, and then I shot myself. Because in that moment I knew I was not better than any of this. I was worse. I was the very worst human on earth at that moment, and what’s more I was weak and I couldn’t tough it out anymore and I deserved to die, and so in my self pity and self hatred and guilt and victimhood (because yes, I would have seen myself as the victim of these events, however distorted a point of view that may be) I pulled the trigger, on the day that never happened. Instead of Götterdämmerung, the tragic-heroic ride into the flames of my dreams, I self-exterminate a cockroach.

For years, there would be speculation as to why I ended it then, when I still had ammunition, just as people speculate about why the Columbine killers stopped with ammunition to spare.

But that wasn’t the end of the day that never happened. It would never end. Families would mourn their dead, and collapse under the strain. The nation would first experience shock and fear, then morbid curiosity, then several go-rounds of looking for scapegoats and blaming the victims, each time hoping to regain a sense of security which would never be restored, finally capping the dysfunction with any one of a number of invasive and arbitrary restrictions, thinking that if only they could get more control, there would be no more shootings.

But the killings came anyway. In a little while, there would  be a half-dozen copycat killings, copied by people who knew my rage and my self-pity, who envied my fame, but who did not understand, until the bitter end, my final hellish self-loathing. And then there were those who copied the copycats, and so on and so forth, until generations knew the suffering I had unleashed.

Every time a human engages in a powerful act, even powerfully evil, it makes it easier for others to follow.

I don’t know why that day never happened. I don’t know why I was spared. I have no explanation for what happened to me at the window that evening. I cannot discern anything that made me different from, say, James Holmes, or Dylan and Kleibold. I simply know what happened.

The girl who brought me to a halt in the what if? She is a genuine person. She would have been in the gym at the time I planned to do my killing. Instead, when I was allowed to return to school, I was placed in the same geometry class as her. I remember her trying to strike up a conversation with me about my reading matter a few times, but since my bullies, too, pretended as if they were friendly, I didn’t trust her. I didn’t really get to know Nancy until an incident about two weeks after I had been allowed to return to school.

The night at the window wasn’t a moment where I had become a different person. It was merely the night when I was handed a set of directions and a tiny glimmer of hope. Perhaps the only difference that could be discerned at that point was that for the first time in two years, I wasn’t carrying a weapon. I had gotten into an altercation with a teacher (I tended to interpret almost anything as an insult. Nay, I lived for the pretext of a personal insult). I had thrown a trash can at him, and then ran off to the gym where I barricaded myself into one of the partitioned classrooms a short distance from my math class and waited, with a pile of dictionaries as improvised weapons, for security to arrive (lets just say I knew the routine by then).

Nancy saw me barricaded in that classroom, armed with a pile of dictionaries, putting on my best dangerous maniac act. She pushed a few desks out of the way, walked into the room, and asked me with disarming sincerity (literally) what was wrong, and if there was anything she could do to help. By the time security arrived, she had talked me into peaceful surrender.

I’ve asked her on a few occasions why she did this. Her answer has been that she knew I wouldn’t hurt her. She then knew something I sure didn’t know at the beginning of the incident.

After an astonishingly mild two week suspension (I was expecting much worse) I was back in class, and Nancy was reeling me into her circle of friends. Whatever was happening baffled me for months, simply didn’t fit into my scheme of things, although it seemed to be a good thing. Somehow we independently ended up in a band together over the summer, and the baffling things continued to happen. Nancy liked my paintings. Nancy liked to talk philosophy and was impressed, rather than wierded out by my reading list (most 14 year olds don’t read Kierkegaard). Nancy’s friends were nice to me, and they didn’t suddenly turn around and become mean. It made no sense.

Finally, about two months after the incident, I was painting an unusual landscape. Instead of green foliage and blue sky, the colors were inverted. It was because the world appeared to be upside down, I told myself. If everything that was happening was as it seemed to be happening then the world was truly upside down. It was upside down because –

And then I stopped painting, because the world really was upside down. Nancy was my friend. A real friend. What I felt was love.  What I felt in return was also love. And I cried.

That’s the story of the way it actually happened.

Ever since then I’ve had an item on my bucket list. It isn’t to visit Paris, or go deep sea fishing, or anything like that. It’s to be like Nancy for someone else.

Because every time a human engages in a powerful act, even powerfully good, it makes it easier for others to follow.