“I asked you about love, and you keep talking about sex.”
“Until you are settled on the fourth floor, that’s about it.”
“Go on.”
“No need to; you get the idea.”
“What about the love on the higher floors?”
“Let’s deal with that when you’re ready,” she said. “Just understand that the world mirrors your level of awareness. Like attracts like—and people whose home base is the first floor are attracted to first-floor kinds of music, books, films, drink, food, sports, and so forth. The same is true of the second and third floors. Until your awareness rests stably on the fourth floor, in the heart, your motives are ultimately self-serving.”
“You’re saying that when my awareness resides more on the fourth level, I won’t be so self-centered?”
“We’re all self-centered, Dan—the question is, which ‘self’ are you centered on—the Basic Self, Conscious Self, or Higher Self? And as your awareness rises from the third to the fourth level, you perceive and experience a different kind of life—you begin to live as a Higher Self in the world.”
“What does all that have to do with where we are now?” I asked, gesturing toward the mountain peak on which we stood.
“I’m glad you asked me that,” she said. “Because I have a small task for you that may help you rise beyond the third floor,” she said, as we stepped around an outcropping of rock, and she pointed to a narrow, level but rocky path about fifty yards long.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“For starters, walk along this path as far as you can; see what there is to see.”
“Door number four?”
She shrugged and, with a graceful gesture, pointed the way.
I walked carefully down the narrow ridge but stopped short as I came to the edge of a precipice—a chasm that dropped to nothingness as far as I could see—maybe two thousand feet—straight down. I took a step back from the dizzying height and looked across the gaping abyss at the opposite cliff wall about thirty feet away. It looked as if the mountain peak had been sliced in half by a gigantic knife.
Suddenly behind me, Mama Chia said, “The door is there.” She pointed across the abyss to a small ledge, little more than an indentation on the opposite cliff wall. But, sure enough, there did appear to be a doorway there. “All you have to do is leap across.”
I gauged the distance again—obviously too far to jump. I looked to Mama Chia to see if she was joking. Her face showed no sign that she was.
“That’s not possible,” I argued. “First of all, it’s twenty-five or thirty feet away, and I’m no long jumper. And even if I made the jump, if I miss that narrow ledge I’ll slam into the cliff face and slide down to oblivion.”
“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asked.
“No, not really—but I’m not stupid, either. It’s suicidal.”
She looked at me with an irritating, know-it-all smile.
“I said no. Not a chance.”
She waited.
“This isn’t a dream now,” I bellowed. “And I’m not a bird.”
“It can be done,” she said, pointing across the chasm.
I started to walk with her back up the trail, shaking my head. “This isn’t about fear, Mama Chia—you know that. It would just be foolish. I don’t mind testing my limits, but if I overreach myself here, I’m dead.”
I felt her hand even before it touched me. The hairs shot up on my neck and goose bumps raised; then I saw a flash of light. Something changed. Or had it? Everything looked the same, but felt different. I was still standing there, talking to her. “Is this a dream?”
“Everything is a dream,” she replied.
“Yes, but I mean right now—”
“There is always the chance,” she added, “that you may fail.”
“If I fail, will I really die?”
“Your physical body will be undamaged, but the pain will feel very real, and, yes, a part of you will most certainly die.”
“But if this is some kind of vision, I can do anything I want.”
“It’s not that simple,” she replied. “You’ll only be able to accomplish what you believe you can; it will still take a leap of faith to make it across. This isn’t really a test of your body, but of your mind—your focus, discipline, intention, and, in a way, your integrity, or integration.
“You’ve already accomplished much—a lifetime’s worth for many. Only accept this challenge if you truly wish to go on. Ask yourself: Can you will yourself across? This is your test of personal power. And there,” she pointed again across the chasm, “lies the path to the fourth door.”
I stared once more out over the chasm. I tested my abilities in this realm by jumping up off the ground, expecting that I might float upward like a man on the moon—but I came down with a physical sensation of landing, and rose no higher than I normally would in my physical body. I tried once again with the same result. This is crazy, I thought. Maybe it was a trick, a test of my judgment. She had said that if I jumped and failed to make it across, “a part of me would die.” Maybe I wasn’t supposed to accept a foolish challenge. What if I declined to jump at all? Yes, that must be it, I thought. It was a test not of my will, but my judgment. I turned to Mama Chia, but she was gone.
Then I heard someone calling for me. “Dan! Help me, please! Help!” I looked across the chasm, to where the voice echoed from, and saw Sachi, clinging to the ledge near where I was to land. It was impossible. Surely a trick of the mind. Then she cried out again. I could see her slipping, struggling to climb back to the ledge.
“This isn’t fair!” I said. “It’s not real!”
“Daaaaannnn!” Sachi yelled desperately. She got a foothold, then lost it.
Then I saw the tiger. It padded along a narrow ledge on the cliff face, moving toward Sachi. She didn’t see it.
“Please!” she called again. I had no choice; I had to try. I ran quickly back along the narrow path for about thirty yards, turned, and took off.
As I picked up speed, doubts assailed me: What am I doing? I don’t think I can make this. Then a kind of cold anger overwhelmed me. Not anger at anything or anyone—just a forceful energy, like a giant wave that washed away everything in its path. Nothing was going to stop me.
Accelerating, focused completely on my goal, I raced toward the precipice. With a surge of power, my mind forgot past and future, tigers and chasms, as I locked on to one thing: the landing spot. I leaped.
For a moment, floating through space, I felt that I might not make it. Still aloft, I soared through space and time, as if in slow motion. I felt the heavy pull of gravity taking control. I felt myself dropping. Then, something happened. Maybe it was my imagination, but drawing on everything within me, I willed myself across. I felt like I was flying.
An instant later, I landed with a very real thud, and, rolling into the shallow cave, I hit the wall. The tiger was running toward us. Dazed, I stumbled to the edge, reached down, and pulled Sachi up. Then, just as the tiger leaped, I pulled her through the doorway.
I must have hit the wall pretty hard. As soon as I was through the door, I passed out.
I AWOKE, MOMENTS LATER, in the dim light. My arms were bruised, and my head hurt. I hurt all over. I looked at my wrist; it was crooked—broken. Then, as I watched it, the wrist straightened itself out, the bruises disappeared, and the pain subsided. I closed my eyes for a few moments.
WHEN I OPENED THEM, I was sitting up, on an old sheet, beside an open grave at the sacred burial site of the kahunas.
The morning sun struck Mama Chia’s face, bathing it in a rosy glow. But she looked pale and drawn, in spite of it. Noticing me staring, she smiled wanly, and said, “The last few days have been challenging for both of us. If you think I look bad, you should see yourself.”
She handed me a plastic bottle with water. “Drink this.”
“Thanks.” I was parched, and gratefully I took the water. Since my episode out at s
ea, I had little tolerance for going thirsty. That fear, at least, seemed to remain in the depths of my Basic Self.
When I finished drinking, Mama Chia stood. “Come on. We have a long walk back.” We said a respectful good-bye to Lanikaula, and though he didn’t appear to us in the daylight, I could feel his presence and blessing.
On the way back, it struck me: Although I’d cleared the third floor and shown sufficient discipline, focus, and self-mastery to find and pass through the door to the fourth floor, my vision had ended then; I had not made it to the fourth floor. I had some sense of what had happened, but I asked Mama Chia for her view.
She gave a simple, straightforward response: “You aren’t ready yet. Your psyche rejected it. You came back.”
“So I blew it,” I said.
“That’s oversimplifying, but it comes out to about the same thing.”
“So what do I do now?”
“Well … your training with Socrates helped you with the first three floors, as I’ve said. You are prepared to enter the fourth level. It may happen at any time. But, you see, the Great Leap requires that the Conscious Self, the ego, loosen its grip. That may be what’s holding you back.”
IT SOON TURNED DARK. We camped in the rain forest. Tomorrow, I thought, we would have an easy walk—a couple of hours, then home.
Soon after starting out in the morning, however, we came to the foot of a dramatic waterfall, thundering down from a shelf forty feet above.
“You know,” I said, gazing at the pounding falls, “Socrates once cautioned me about getting too fascinated with inner stuff, with visions and such. He said it can lead some people, who aren’t too grounded to start with, into all kinds of illusions. He used to tell me, even after sending me on an inner journey, to keep the lesson and throw away the experience.
“So, I’ve been thinking—maybe all these visions don’t prove anything conclusive. It’s a lot easier to be courageous or uninhibited or disciplined in a dream than in real life. I don’t really feel that different. How do I know anything’s really changed?”
“What you’ve gone through was much more than a dream, Dan. And keep an open mind about what you call ‘real life.’”
“But I still want to prove something to myself.”
Mama Chia smiled and shook her head, amused. She gazed intently at me for a few moments, then looked at the falls, then back at me. “Okay,” she said. “You need to prove something? Go meditate under that waterfall for a while.”
I took a fresh look at the falls, and considered it. That was a lot of water crashing down; it wouldn’t be like taking a shower. “Yeah, I can do that,” I answered casually. I had once seen something like this in a martial arts movie. “Okay. I accept. I’ll do it for twenty minutes.”
“Five hours would prove a lot more,” she said quickly.
“Five hours? I’d drown in five hours! Or suffer brain damage!”
“I’d say the damage has already been done.”
“Very funny. Okay then, maybe I’ll try it for one hour, but that’s tops. I don’t even know if that long is possible.” I removed my shirt and started to take off my sneakers, then decided against that and left them on. I stepped carefully on the slippery, moss-covered rocks, and climbed out under the falls.
I was almost knocked flat by the force of the water. Fighting my way in, almost slipping twice, I found a place to perch on a flat rock and sat, pushing my spine straight up under the force of the deluge. The water was cold, but in this climate bearable. I’m glad the weather’s warm, I thought, before the liquid avalanche drowned out all thoughts.
Through sheer determination and a growing tension headache before everything got numb, I stuck it out for what felt like an hour, so I figured that at least twenty minutes had passed. I was preparing to call the game on account of rain, when something stopped me. Maybe it was courage, or determination, or discipline. Or just pigheaded stubbornness.
Years before, when the coach would ask for fifteen handstand push-ups, I would always do twenty. I’d always been like that, as long as I could remember. So, while I kept wanting to get up, get out, quit—something kept stopping me. Somewhere in the back of my mind (the front of my mind had already drowned) was Mama Chia’s challenge, playing again and again like a mantra: five hours, five hours, five hours …
In my years of gymnastics, my Basic Self had been trained to respond to the word “challenge” by pulling out all the stops. I felt a surge of energy rising up through my abdomen and chest as I realized that I was actually going for the full five hours—and that I might just make it. No, I would make it, do or die.
Then the world disappeared in the deluge, and my mind was no more.
SOMEWHERE IN THE POUNDING, in the noise that grew fainter and farther away, I heard the wind, and I saw a white tower flying toward me in my mind’s eye.
I found myself in a tiny room. Acrid smells filled the air, odors of sewage and decay, partly masked by strong incense. I recognized the dress—colorful saris even in this terrible poverty. There was no mistaking this place. I was somewhere in India.
Across the room, a woman, wearing the garb of a nun, was caring for a bedridden leper, his face a mass of sores. He had a deep, oozing fissure in his check, I noted with disgust, and he was missing an ear. He was dying. Recoiling from the sight, revolted by the smells, and the sickness, I stepped back, in shock, and withdrew.
The wind gusted; I leaned against a worn brick wall in an alleyway in France, just off the narrow rue de Pigalle. A gendarme was picking up a drunk, covered with vomit, smelling of the gutter, to help him into the police van. Disgusted, I stepped back, and this scene, too, receded in the distance.
The wind blew again; I sat like a ghost, unseen, on the bed of a teenage boy, in an upper-class suburban house in Los Angeles. He was sniffing powder up his nose. Stupid kid, I thought. Get me out of here.
The next instant, I stood outside a hut in Africa, gazing through the doorway at a very old man, moving painfully, trying to get some water into the cracked mouth of a young baby, its belly swollen, its ribs almost breaking through the skin.
“What is this?” I cried out loud, feeling like I was back in hell. “What do these people have to do with me? Take me away from here! I can’t take this; I don’t want any more.”
My eyes closed, I shook my head back and forth to shut out these people and their suffering. I heard a voice calling me, growing louder. “Dan … Dan.”
I BECAME VAGUELY AWARE of Mama Chia, under the waterfall with me, pulling my arm, yelling, “Dan … come out! You’re finished.”
“Y-y-you c-c-an say th-that again,” I managed to mutter. Shivering like a waterlogged cat, I staggered out from under the falls, shaking my head, trying to clear it. I stumbled and fell upon some soft grasses and lay in the sun, letting the rays slowly seep into my chilled body. When I finally opened my eyes, Mama Chia was sitting quietly nearby, gazing up at the falls.
“I’m not taking a shower for a year.”
Mama Chia opened a mango and handed me a piece.
“I think I grew gills,” I said. “Anyway, that proved something, didn’t it?”
“Yes it did: While you were slowly drowning, I hiked to my house, took a nap, visited with a friend, walked back, and enjoyed this mango.” She tossed the large pit into the bushes. “It proves something all right—that one of us is a fool.”
Mama Chia laughed so sweetly that I had to chuckle, too.
“You have a good spirit, Dan. I knew that from the start. Socrates helped you to turn on the lights of the third floor. So now, when your Conscious Self resolves to do something, your Basic Self knows your level of commitment and gives you the energy to accomplish it. I’ll grant you that much,” she said with solemnity. “You have become a human being.”
“That’s all?”
“Quite an accomplishment—it means you’ve done some housecleaning on the first three floors. You’ve gotten in touch with your body, with the world, and with your hu
manity.”
“But, something happened under the waterfall,” I told her. “I saw all these poor people—the sick, the dying. Somehow, I think I visited the—”
“Fourth floor,” she finished for me. “Yes, I sensed that—down at the cabin, in my sleep.” She nodded, but her eyes looked a little sad.
“Well, what did it mean? Did I pass?”
“The waterfall, yes. The fourth floor, no.”
CHAPTER 15
In the Service of Spirit
I slept, and I dreamt that life was all joy.
I woke, and saw that life was but service.