The Early Awakening

For centuries, the beaches at Ventura and Santa Barbara, California, have been quiet and safe harbors on the long Pacific coast. The surf is normally calm, because that coast is protected from the west by the five Channel Islands. At all hours, one can see pelicans coursing across the horizon in odd-numbered formations. Well after sunset, long-legged sea birds endlessly farm the receding waves for small crustaceans to eat.

The ocean is an irresistible magnet for young people in Santa Barbara. I had a solid, wooden, eight-foot surfboard that was difficult to maneuver and even harder to ride. The ocean culture of surfing and beach life provides a deep conditioning that never leaves you, even when the water of many oceans and the always-new breezes flowing over and through you end. A hundred oil platforms later marred the view of the Channel Islands and left tar-ball deposits on the beautiful beaches, but in our day, the coast was worthy of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

* * *

Life in Santa Barbara in the 1950s was slow, and we lived outdoors ten months out of the year. Studies were rigorous at my college preparatory school, Laguna Blanca, and they occupied most of my life — except on weekends, when the lure of the ocean couldn't be resisted. It isn't a contradiction to say that life was seriously happy for my generation and me.

Eugene "Bud" Burdick, a maternal cousin, wrote The Ninth Wave in 1956, referring to the largest in the category of waves. It captured so much of the culture of the decade. Television, drugs, big sports events, and alcohol as entertainment and escapes were not yet prevalent in the youth culture. The government wanted us to be preoccupied with its hyped threat of communism — in the Joseph McCarthy era — but most of us didn't buy it. We had few social battlefields, but that would change in the next decade.

* * *

Questions about life and living arose in my mind and occupied me regardless of where I was. Spiritual questions were about the process of daily living. I considered each thought and asked myself, "Where did that come from?" and "There is something hidden in that situation. What is it?" Self-doubt took root, and more and more, I wanted to understand who I was and why I behaved as I did.

When our parakeet died in 1952, Grandfather Charles Lee cautioned me, "Don't believe everything you think." His advice had the strong quality of a different kind of thinking, where beliefs and ideas are suspect and in need of closer examination. Church and its many beliefs, which had never been a strong influence anyway, suddenly took on a whole new significance as I saw that Christianity didn't foster or encourage understanding the self or even allow doubt or self-reflection. In her youth, my mother, Alrena Lee, had been a follower of Amy Semple McPherson, but later went back and forth between the Methodists and the Presbyterians. Theirs was, for her, relatively safe religion with few ceremonies and beliefs.

When the local minister dropped "Christ was not a Christian" in his sermon one Sunday in 1952, I went to him in adolescent defiance and asked that my name be struck from the church roll and records. It was apparent that organized religion had only a partial story to tell, and I wanted no more of it. My brother Charles and I were indifferent toward religion. Protestants were generally mild-mannered and only placidly interesting because they rarely ask the big questions of life, and their worship and ceremonies were all designed to create comfort and peace, thereby dulling the mind. Catholics had broader views but were often crippled by the fears that ritual, belief, and religious hierarchy tend to produce. Few of our friends were seriously religious. In the United States in those days, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims were almost completely unknown, so a latent but benign agnosticism prevailed among young people.

Paradoxically, classical church and temple architecture fascinated me then and still does. I regularly look out for religious architecture that allows me to appreciate the skill of artisans who have created it for a high calling and rarely signed their work. Anonymity is a rare virtue. What other buildings in the world have such vast and soaring spaces devoted to being quiet, listening to music, and holding light and shadow so respectfully? There must have been some deep spiritual insight that permitted early builders to capture the ineffable qualities of nature and the beyond and to put them so purely in stone and glass. The difference between the sacred and the profane is so clearly manifested in spiritual architecture, where resonance and golden symmetry provide for silence.

* * *

What had stirred in me was an awareness that there is a very great and unexplainable and forceful otherworld presence in life that is ever present, just here — close and intimate — but seldom manifest. What I saw was that it was available when "I" was not there — that is, when I was not "I" or when there was no consciousness of "me" but the presence only of something vast and beyond words. It was a living energy.

Seeing all this was tentative, and I was shy to even acknowledge it, let alone share it with others. But it was growing and taking root in me. The wonder is that one can be an observer of thought — that there is a faculty that can explore itself, or at least its own thoughtful creations, a faculty that can ask where thoughts come from and what prompts them, and observe those that are loaded with emotion or fear. All this came freely and easily and set me on a course that was to last a lifetime.

Without knowing what I was doing, meditation became a regular occurrence in my life. But I had no word for it. I began to watch — to look rather than react. I began to question and was dissatisfied with almost everything that seemed immutable. I thought everyone did this. I thought it was a function of awareness and thinking. Slowly, I woke up to thought as a process and that there is a world beyond thought. A sense of oneness with the natural world emerged as the nonintellectual experience of reality in moments of heightened aliveness grew. Spiritual experiences came to me, but they were ineffable, incapable of being adequately expressed in words or concepts.

* * *

Lady Luia Forbes, a South...