Meditation & The Republican Party

Once at the hermitage just south of Big Sur on the side of the hill just east of Highway One, I fell into such a profound meditation I had to open my eyes and shake myself awake before I became somebody else or lost myself altogether.

I was sitting in a white plastic chair in the garden behind my cinder-block cell underneath a dwarf peach tree. The Pacific Ocean was at my feet when I closed my eyes. My personal customized meditation procedure in those days was to breathe in and out of my nose and to let whatever thoughts that came into my mind pass like clouds pass in the sky.

Suddenly, very suddenly, the suddeness perhaps influenced by the beatific circumstances, a golden light descended, draping me in a robe Allen Ginsberg might have recognized were he still alive. It wasn't an achievement, as there was no real goal involved, it was more a gradually sudden or suddenly gradual transference from one realm to another.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that the little peach tree had become rooted in the ocean. A small bird flew into my right hand, which I'd kept open on my thigh in the perfect position of acceptance, and then another small bird flew into my left hand. I seemed to be both walking across the Pacific Ocean and going nowhere, able to do both at the same time, but there was absolutley no physical effort involved. And I, if there was an I, was the one both looking at what was happening out there within me and the one to whom the looking was happening, or something like that.

I stayed with the meditation longer than necessary perhaps--it felt so good, so new and strange--until I became afraid of losing my identity altogether and had to step forcefully out of it to remain myself forever, and just in the nick of time.

Watching The Republican Convention last night on PBS, I was amused how the crew there--Judy, Gwen, Mark and David--looked as if they were reporting on an invasion of aliens. The interviews with Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and Congressman Phil Gingrey (R-Georgia) were especially intriguing, as was the speech by Mia Love, a black woman and the mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah. At one point Mark Russell had to inform Sen. Barrasso, who'd been going on and on about the evils of the EPA and the regulations imposed on the extraction industry in the state of Wyoming, that it was a Republican president who'd authorized the agency in the early 1970's and that in fact without it the whole Great Lakes region would now be a completely despoiled, foetid, stinking mess...

...then a woman from Delaware, an 'entrepreneur' who'd built her own business despite having to fight governmental interference every step of the way, spoke. She wore high heels and designer eye-glasses with a heavy black frame. And then Chris Christie, Gov. New Jersey,  gave the keynote speech...

Something interesting is happening here, I thought as I watched. I don't like it very much, but it's interesting. I wondered if the Republican Party was not on some brink as well, transfixed by its own strangeness, intoxicated with an image of itself that has very little, if not nothing, to do with the world it really lives in.