Learning

And the assimilation of life experiences

In our 30s, Sandy and I joined a spiritual community, which no longer exists. It was not your everyday religious group. It was based on a stripped-down account of the life and teachings of Jesus, not as the first Christian, as the son of God, nor as a mythical figure with magical healing powers. Rather, it was the study of the life, activities, and teachings of a real and extraordinary person with much to say that is relevant today. The idea was to incorporate his mindset into our own, develop our full potential, and become teachers and leaders who live life with the same consciousness he possessed during his lifetime. That idea included the concept of totality: You would give your all to this good end. You would live “the teaching.”

Tall order! We threw ourselves into it, worked hard, and learned more than I might ever express here. Both of us engaged in “the work,” as everyone called it. Belonging to a community with a vision of love in the world felt like I was doing something to make the world a better place. I had an identity. There was a way.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A problem

But a problem emerged: While the community originated with the best intentions, it began to transform into a form of thought control.

I’ll never forget the evening some were gathered in a livingroom. On a question of discussion I can’t even recall anymore, a participant asked, “I wonder what the Community thinks of that?” Someone had the clarity to ask, “No, what do you think of that?” Critical difference: the first question was asked by someone who drew her identity from the community. She struggled to answer.

Another time, I listened attentively to our leader speaking. She said, “When you see something that is true, you must close your mind to it,” accentuated with a loud, dramatic clap of her hands at the word “close.” I remember feeling the electric shudder passing down my spinal cord. Surely this is not so! Yet within seconds, I had indeed closed my mind.

For my leader was the container, and I the contained, I the shadow of another.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Later, as the community grew over a thousand strong, the feeling tone became more strident. A larger membership had become more challenging to control. There came a point when the leader Emelia and her small circle deemed it necessary to purge some, including friends, those who “are not living the life.” They were asked to leave the community. It was like a death in the family. Someone asked how to relate to those who were “purged.” “They are dead,” we were told. Of course, they weren’t dead, but we were supposed to purge everything, even friendship, that distracted us from “living the life,” as defined.

A death

In grief, I rationalized in secret. Surely, this is not so. I can still be friends with them. Not really. We remaining were too busy “doing ‘the work’” for friendship. It was indeed like a death.

The communal feeling tone of welcome, warmth, and support transformed into expectation, judgment, and demand. Our two young sons consumed our energy and time, as children do to parents who love them. Sandy was an especially devoted mother. The community did not lessen its demand: You need to be doing more. Here’s that idea of totality again. You must be in all the way, else you cannot be here at all. You must choose. Sandy and I had long, anguishing conversations. And there was this rule: the two of you must be in or neither of you.

With the honest decision to leave, I was devastated. Like the others, I didn’t measure up. What would I do with my life now?

An afterlife

Over the years, I’ve come to see what a great gift the experience was. All of it: the joining, the working, and the separating.

When we pulled out, I experienced it as dying. My identity was so swallowed up that I felt I had none. Within a month or so, however, others who had left the community or been booted out contacted us. They knew what it was like to be ostracized, to begin to rediscover their own unique identity when it was no longer swallowed up by the community. They were supportive. Another great learning arc took shape. I began to see a future.

Many years later, I met the leader Emelia again, now an old woman. She taught the same teaching, but in small groups in her tiny living room, without ambitions of a big army of followers. She was hardly defeated, just wiser and humbler.

One day, I drove over from the Stanford campus to visit her for lunch. As I entered her small home, she rose to turn off the TV. Before the screen darkened, I glimpsed the Nazi tanks on the screen. “I did that,” she said of the PBS documentary. I nodded. She spoke neither with pride nor humiliation, but honest self-awareness, for she, too, had fallen under an illusion that she would change everything. Along the march, her natural hunger for power took over. Well-intentioned people suffered beneath the boot heels of her powerful ego. A community had formed with noble intentions but lost its way, along with its leader.

But that afternoon in her house, who was this who turned from the TV to greet me with this wonderful, welcoming smile and warmth? A simple teacher, leading one by one, everyone precious and unique, teaching anyone who would listen and learn. Who cannot learn from one who sees her errors, accepts responsibility, moves on, and gives back to anyone who will listen to all that she learned from her own experience?

We visited with her often and learned in new, much different ways.

Over time, the strong identity I was born to have — as a husband, father, and friend — had emerged from the shadow of another to meet the challenges awaiting.

And I would discover another identity: to be the one writing this. I’d always wanted to write and discovered that I could tell stories like this one, stories of experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve known, the life journeys I’ve observed and taken, the missteps. I count it all as great fortune.

The assimilation of experience

It’s been over 40 years since that time with the community, time to assimilate that experience — i.e., to absorb it all. To assimilate an experience is to allow it to free and empower you, as our body assimilates food or a tree assimilates water and nutrients.

Photo by Manas Nai on Unsplash

I often reread from the exalted Sermon on the Mount and hear the words of Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth, urging us over the millennia to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Oh, does that speak the truth to us now in America, where neighbors excommunicate neighbors with callous unfeeling and hatred! What does it mean to love the excommunicator as thyself?

I believe that assimilating great teachings, whatever their origin — I mean, truly learning their meaning and understanding their implications in our individual lives — is not a process that can be organized. It is achieved independently, one by one, through practice and refinement.

Trying to organize the life of the spirit misses the point entirely.

So each day, I take my next baby step, move forward, falter, succeed a little, and the next day opens with opportunities to learn how better to love.

I wonder how young people learn today? Through all the noise, I mean — how will they find their depth within that awaits their humble arrival at last, perhaps as lost as I felt?

It is the life of the spirit, I’m talking about, the emergence of the extraordinary, individual human spirit, extending its branches outward as a tree, reaching out to love, one by one, day by day.