Читать книгу The Mindful Addict - Tom Catton - Страница 14
ОглавлениеAs I held the match under the spoon, heating up the water to help the white powder dissolve, the anticipation of shooting pure methedrine into my veins caused a feeling of electricity to race through my sleepless and deprived body. I had been awake for three days, and every time I fixed, I told myself I would never do it again. My wife was asleep. It was 2 a.m., and the world was quiet. But this quietness did not exist inside my head. Anxiety, fear, and separation plagued me like demons. I had moved beyond any human level of desperation. I would have settled for hell.
Sitting in the bathroom with a soft light on, I tied a belt around my arm and pumped up my veins. Gently, almost sexually, I tapped the top of the syringe until I saw blood back up—the sign the needle is in the vein. I had become so intimate with my loneliness through the process of fixing dope. How did I get here? I squeezed the syringe, and the rush overtook me as my hair stood on end. My using had become a madman’s paradox: The more I used to get further out of myself, the deeper I found myself locked within. I created a new prison with every hit.
At the time we lived on the Venice Canals in Venice, California. It was the summer of 1967, the time of love-ins, Tim Leary, LSD, and free love. We were hippies, extending a childhood dream of blissful states, resonating love, and dancing in the streets. So why was I in this bathroom alone? Where was the love? I was not free. My flowers had turned brown. The garden was in decay. What had happened since the first time I picked up a drink and then continued on to drugs? Drugs and alcohol had initially given me relief from the separateness I felt. Even though I had come from a loving middle-class family, I never felt I fit in. Drugs helped ease my feelings of disconnection, so I continued to use them, seeking relief from those feelings that had haunted me my entire life. The dope brought a softness I had mistaken as peace. The drugs had simply silenced me.
As I removed the needle from my arm and felt the drug rush through my body, touching every cell within, I sat there with the syringe in my hand, blood dripping on the floor, waiting for relief that did not seem to come. How many times had I repeated this scene? Again I found myself high and trembling on uneasy knees. Again I found myself praying and in pain. I had always believed in a God, so I prayed to be released, not even sure from what or to where. My hands shook as I folded them to pray, the way I had been taught. Yet now, kneeling on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, my devotion seemed destroyed. Fear and despair were all I knew.
I sat there and reflected back almost twenty years earlier, on the memory of my first day of school, when the feelings of isolation and separation began. I was four-and-a-half years old. We lived in a small rented house on about an acre of land in Mar Vista, California, which was only a few miles from the house in Venice. Mom packed my lunchbox and loaded my sister in the baby carriage, and we walked about ten minutes up our alley to the school.
Our dog, Dane, followed closely behind. I looked around at the familiar surroundings, but everything appeared strange. It seemed like my life was changing, and I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling. I wanted to say, “No, Mom, I can’t do this. I can’t leave you, Cindy, and Dane. Mom, I’m too little to do this.” But my mouth didn’t form these words. On the short walk, I seemingly slipped through a portal into a world that may have looked the same, but where I did not belong.
As we walked into the schoolyard, kids were running around having fun, and they all seemed to know each other. I knew immediately I was different and hid behind Mom’s floral skirt as we walked into the classroom. I looked down and studied the checkered tile floor. Desks were lined up in perfect order, and a blackboard took up most of one wall. All kinds of paper decorations and colored objects hung on the other walls. As kids rushed in and happily sat at their desks, I felt overwhelmed by feelings of sheer terror I had never experienced. All I could do was beg my mom not to leave.
Of course, she had to go, and I was left alone in this perplexing new world with peculiar people. As the teacher wrote on the blackboard, the other students nodded their heads in understanding, writing down our daily activities. But I was frozen, paralyzed within, to the extent of hearing the sound coming out of the teacher’s mouth—but the words were in a language I could not understand. The disease of addiction—which is rooted in separation—had started in little Tommy’s life. This was the moment in which I clearly remember encountering my first feelings of separation and not fitting in, feelings I later discovered are nearly universal for addicts. Little did I know these unpleasant feelings would intensify and cause me and others great pain as I grew older.
Along with the LSD movement happening in the sixties, eastern philosophy had become popular in the U.S. While living in Southern California I would go to the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), an organization that taught meditation. It had a meditation chapel and bookstore where you could purchase all sorts of books about the spiritual life. SRF was about a mile up Sunset Boulevard from Coast Highway 1. The sprawling grounds were home to a lake, with beautiful gardens dotting the hillsides that sloped down to the path surrounding it. People visited to walk the garden paths and to find a sanctuary in the middle of the busy city. It became my place for a psychedelic experience, taking LSD as I strolled amongst the devotees.
SRF was founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of Autobiography of a Yogi. I read this book in 1966. That was my first experience with eastern philosophy, and I was strongly drawn to the book and its spiritual teachings. Yogananda describes growing up in India, traveling in the Himalaya mountains, and the many gurus he encountered on his journeys.
This philosophy seemed to dovetail with the LSD movement, including the belief that the love and light that exist within everyone lead to being one with God. It didn’t include a concept of hell or the devil. Instead, it focused on the importance of karma—the idea that whatever you put out, you will get back. My heart was immediately attracted to these beliefs. My soul was craving to find its way home.
SRF offered meditation lessons through the mail, so I readily subscribed. After shooting methedrine or taking any variety of assorted drugs, I would try to meditate, but with 70,000 drug-induced thoughts a minute rushing through my head, I was unable to find the way to the one breath the lessons described. From the time I started using drugs, I experimented with many different chemicals. LSD, pot, hashish, and mescaline were all used by our generation for spiritual reasons; at least that is what I told myself.
Despite my best intentions, I inevitably returned to the destructive cycle of shooting drugs and taking mind-altering pills. Today it’s clear to me that although I was constantly searching for a spiritual solution, drugs failed to lessen my emotional pain. But as an addict, I was unable to stop using drugs and rely solely on meditation and the teachings of popular gurus. Drugs had become part of my solution, and it was impossible to see that these mind-numbing, painkilling agents were actually hindering my ability to connect with the spirit. I was unable to hear the words “You have a drug problem.” This was the 1960s. The only “problem” was that not everyone used drugs. My using had brought on the rationalization that was pulling me to the bottom spiritually, physically, and emotionally.
The Venice Canals were made up of waterways that ran parallel to each other, like the actual Venice canals in Italy. In the 1920s this was considered a high-end place to live, but by the 1960s it was more or less run down. Lots of so-called hippies were living in the houses lining each canal. Today this area has been renovated to its previous high-dollar real estate status. The entrance of our small, stucco house faced a waterway. The only way to approach the front of the house was via a small boat. An alley ran behind the house so that it could be approached by car. I was constantly strung out and sleeping very little because I was shooting so much speed. Nevertheless, I continued to study my SRF lessons. A line in one of the lessons read: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When I read this, it was as if a neon sign flashed those words in my mind, and in the months to come I never forgot that statement.
Using speed and not sleeping, I felt more and more hopeless. I peered, bleary-eyed, out the windows all night, watching shadow people moving through the streets and bouncing off the sides of houses. Were they warning me? Protecting me? Or after me? I believed my house was being watched and my phone was tapped. Sometimes I rowed my small boat up and down the canals all night, the water reflecting the moonlight as I glided across the glassy surface, with only the sound of the oars as they splashed in the water. It was a romantic scene. The key problem was that my wife was asleep, leaving only me and my German shepherd dogs in the rowboat to guard against nefarious forces unknown. As I floated by, the darkened shoreline houses appeared almost peaceful, a feeling I had long ago lost. When I drifted by a house with muted light shining through a window, I wondered, “Are they like me? What is running through their veins?” The drugs and sleep deprivation made me feel completely paranoid, although some of my paranoia was probably well-founded.
One day some friends were over, and we were using drugs. While looking out the window, I saw a nondescript black sedan that looked like a narc’s car slowing down near our house. My intuition turned to alarm, and I yelled for everyone to clear out. Everyone dove out the front windows and ran down the canals. I ran out into the alley with my two dogs and watched, calmly, as the narcs got out of their car and began walking up to my house. Without forethought, I suddenly jumped directly in their faces, which curtailed their surprise attack. They just stood there, stunned, before returning to their car and driving away.
Shaken by the incident, I knew things were getting out of hand on the canals. Even with my shattered emotions, I was able to hear an inner voice. It told me I could no longer keep running in place. I had to move. I went to my friend Wes’s house and told him I thought we should leave town. Wes was strung out also, so we packed up a bunch of drugs (not speed, because I had vowed to stop using it) and determined the best plan to get out of town quickly. I turned to my parents, who knew what was going on in my life. I had encouraged their denial of my condition, but my behavior and the circumstances of my life soon broke through the façade that I was okay. They had found drugs in my dresser drawers when I was living at home, and a syringe had dropped out of my dirty clothes once when I went to use their washer. So in their own desperation to help me, and not knowing what else to do, my parents gave Wes and me money to fly back to Hawaii. I had been going back and forth between Hawaii and California since my first visit in 1962 when I was kicked out of the twelfth grade.
I started surfing in 1959. Living in Southern California, it seemed like the thing to do. Attending Santa Monica High, I was only about four blocks from the beach, so my surfboard resided in the back of my 1955 Ford station wagon at all times. Surfing at lunchtime or before school became a daily routine.
My next-door neighbor Ron and I would head up to Malibu Point before school. I remember perfect five- to six-foot glassy waves and the water shining like a mirror as we paddled out at dawn. On beautiful, sunny days, with perfect waves and a gentle offshore breeze, I was in total bliss. Taking off on a wave on my nine-foot-threeinch Velzy and Jacobs board and turning in to a wall of water made everything else disappear. While surfing, I was completely in the present moment. All my problems, stress, and anything weighing on my mind were completely dismissed. It was just me, the water, and the sound of the surfboard slipping across the wave’s face, like a rock skipping across the surface of a windless lake.
I would look up as Ronnie was paddling out on his knees. As our eyes met, no words were necessary. He knew what was going on inside me, and we just smiled at this beautiful moment—the perfect wave and the flawless ride. During these moments in the ocean, I understood connectivity to myself, to others, and to nature. Although the ride usually lasted for only seconds, it seemed like an eternity.
Experiences like this bring a person completely into the moment. Later I learned from my meditation practice that being in the moment is where real happiness is found. Today, as I move through my life, I practice being in the present in all of my activities—it’s like riding that wave.
By the time I entered high school, the separateness had become a regular part of my life. I was extremely shy and unsure of myself in unfamiliar situations, especially with girls, and there was no way I could ever ask anyone out on a date. My self-doubt was enormous, but once I discovered getting loaded, a whole new world opened up to me.
My parents were social drinkers who had booze in our house for get-togethers when their friends came over for the evening. I remember my first drinking experience. My friends and I filled quart jars with a little vodka and some bourbon and scotch—a nice toxic mixture. Then we drank it. As the alcohol went down my throat, it burned and gagged me. I could barely get the stuff down. But at the same time, this wonderful feeling of warmth surged throughout my body. For the first time, I felt truly okay. I felt complete.
I got exceedingly drunk, threw up everywhere, and woke up the next day with a terrible hangover. I didn’t remember much about the night before, but I sure wanted to do it again—and really soon. Alcohol had magically taken away that terrifying feeling of separation that had become a powerful part of my life. The aftermath the following day left me shaky, dehydrated, and torn down, but it seemed like a fair trade for that momentary state of self-assured bliss. What another may have viewed as degradation, I simply saw as part of the experience— jagged around the edges, but smooth enough for me to endure.
So the adventure had started, and there was no turning back. I thought it was a marvelous experience. From a shy person who was too timid to ask a woman for a date, I had turned into a wild man who went to parties and ended up running around naked and out of my mind. I began to feel connected to a world from which I had previously felt so separated. Alcohol had become my friend, and my world was okay when I was hanging out with this new friend. I began to develop a sort of selective amnesia, my mind forgetting all the nightmarish scenes that would ensue. I was learning the art of bargaining with myself. Or was it the gift of denial?
I was open to anything that got me high. My new principle to live by was: Try anything once, and if the resulting damage is in any way negotiable, a second time will settle any doubts. I soon began sniffing glue. I became a regular at hobby shops, buying model airplane glue and squirting the glue into a sock.
Surfing and getting drunk or loaded went together for me at that time. The drugs and alcohol did for me what I couldn’t do for myself. I used my station wagon for surfing and dating, with the backseat in a down position at all times. This served two functions: It was great for surfing trips when people had to ride in the back with the boards, and it was great for date night at the drive-in movies. Now I had the courage to ask girls out, but I had absolutely no social or dating skills. Where other guys may have used tried-and-true standbys like flowers or a serenade from a guitar to court a girl, I would bring out the beer and glue socks. It’s easy to imagine what a healthy teenage boy wants to do while on a date with a beautiful girl at the drive-in. My problem was that when I got close to making out with my date, I would stick a glue rag between our mouths and say, “Try this.” I always wondered why the girl didn’t want to go out with me again. The disconnect between reality and how I was starting to operate only deepened, and the line between myself and “them” was unmistakable.
So drugs became my best friend, especially grass and pills. Chemicals were now my confidant, seductress, lifestyle, and destination all in one. I remember the first time I took a stimulant, those little white cross pills called Benzedrine, or “bennies.” My then-girlfriend Cindi, a beautiful Asian girl, lived about twenty miles north in Malibu, so I took three bennies and started driving up the Coast Highway. All of a sudden they kicked in, and my first thought (being a true addict) was: “I have to have a thousand of these things.” The second thought was: “Where is a hitchhiker when you need one?” I was so wired out by the pills that I was talking to myself nonstop.
I would have been a graduate of the class of 1962 at Santa Monica High School, but by the eleventh grade I was slipping away from student life. Consistent with my surfer lifestyle, I began growing my hair long, resulting in frequent expulsions from school. I also missed many classes to go surfing at lunchtime, often not returning to school, or sometimes I went surfing before school and didn’t go to class at all that day. Teachers, classrooms, and a formal education seemed like trivial things I had moved beyond. I had evolved into a creature who spent his days surfing the sunlit waves and his nights stoned under the moon- and starlit sky.
The summer before my senior year, school officials told my parents I had to get a haircut before I would be allowed to attend classes. I thought, “That’s great, let me just quit now.” But my parents wouldn’t go for that, so I got a haircut and was allowed to enter the twelfth grade. I had already given up on school and reacted to everything with total rebellion: missing or getting expelled from classes, talking back to my teachers, not doing homework. I worked diligently at dropping out. My plan worked. Eventually, I just reported to the dean’s office in place of certain classes, and finally I was kicked out of school for good.
What does a typical California surfer do after being kicked out of school? He heads for a surfing heaven like Hawaii, which is exactly what I did in April of 1962. It was my first trip to the islands, and I stayed on Oahu for about a month. I arrived late at night and was picked up by some friends I had surfed with in California who had arrived in Hawaii a few weeks before me. As I stepped off the plane, the warm, balmy breeze swept over me, and the fragrant air was especially sweet; this tropical environment felt so good. This place felt like home. The spell of the islands had been cast.
Early the next morning, I headed for the ocean, strolling through the empty streets of Waikiki. Watching the coconut trees swaying in the morning breeze, I walked across the sand and dipped my foot into the water. It was like a heated pool. I dove in, and my body immediately tingled with the warmth of the water washing over me. In contrast to the shockingly cold California ocean, this water seemed to embrace me. The ocean’s heavier salt content kept my body buoyant and stung my eyes as the water rolled down my face. I had played in the ocean my whole life, but this first experience in the waters of Hawaii was like stepping through a portal into another consciousness.
It was as if part of my being had been hypnotized, and the magic waters shook me awake. I knew in that moment I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the islands.
That first trip I stayed in Hawaii for a month, just surfing and lying on the beach. I spent the summer months back in California at Malibu Beach doing more of the same—surfing and getting high. I returned to Hawaii for a second trip in December of 1962 for another month of surfing.
Despite my love for the ocean, during that period of time in Santa Monica, including the two trips to Hawaii, I became hopelessly lost. The drugs had already quit working, but I continued to use them. The feelings of self-doubt, fear, and separation had returned. Getting high was no longer effective in deadening my emotional pain.
In the summer of 1963, I went back to Hawaii for my third trip. I landed with a surfboard and about fifteen dollars in my pocket. I didn’t work for the entire four months I was there. Being only nineteen at the time, having quit school and learned no vocational skills, and not knowing how to even look for a job, I knew nothing but this lifestyle of surfing and using drugs. I would break into a car on the street late at night, curl up on the backseat and fall asleep, and then wake up the next morning and head for the nearest gas station to use the restroom. The rest of the day, I surfed and begged for money on the street. I was homeless long before it became as commonplace as it is today.
We certainly look different on the outside than we feel on the inside. There was something adventurous about being a surf bum, spending days in the sun and ocean and nights at parties. Tom Catton, I’m sure, was acquiring a certain reputation as I traveled back and forth between Southern California and Hawaii, looking like the free-spirited soul with long blond hair and a suntanned body—but that was only the outer image.
By summer’s end, I had sold my surfboard and decided to go back to California. Lost and overwhelmed with intense feelings of separation, I had no idea what to do with my life, and neither did my parents. A few months later, a friend joined the U.S. Navy. I had never paid attention to the draft or what military service was really about, but I didn’t know what else to do, and it was easier to sign up with Uncle Sam than to look for a job. It was a drastic choice, but I was desperate for a direction.
The night before joining the Navy as a seaman apprentice, I went to a party and got really loaded. My friends and I were driving with booze, pills, and pot in the car and got pulled over by the cops. When we began throwing things out the window, we were arrested and taken to jail. I told the cops I was leaving for boot camp in San Diego the next morning, and they just shook their heads and let me go.
The next day I woke up in a daze from the night before, but somehow made it to the bus that transported us all to boot camp. I slept most of the way from Los Angeles to San Diego, about a two and-a-half-hour drive. As the bus drove onto the military base, I looked out the window at an alien world. Everyone was wearing uniforms, and they all looked alike. I saw white stucco buildings with red-tiled roofs neatly lined up as far as I could see. When I realized the magnitude of what I had done, fear rose up in me. I thought, “Tom, where are you, and what have you done?”
I got off the bus and joined about 400 guys in line to get our heads shaved. My last haircut had been the one they had made me get in order to return to school in the twelfth grade. A military official looked at me and said, “What are you, one of those L.A. hoods or surfers? Come with me, punk.” He put me at the front of the line and I had my head shaved. This shameful walk only confirmed my fears; I realized then that joining the military was a huge mistake.
I made it through boot camp and about a year on the Navy ship to which I was assigned, but I became very fed up with the military lifestyle. After a weekend at home, I decided not to go back to my ship, taking a leave of absence without permission. I hit the streets for about thirty days; no haircuts. I had my ear pierced, and got really wasted.
I still had the problem of the military. I devised a surefire exit strategy. I figured if I returned to the ship but refused to cooperate, the Navy would give me a discharge. I returned late at night as our ship was preparing to leave for another few weeks at sea. This vessel was a huge guided missile cruiser with a brig overseen by Marines. When I went aboard, the officer on duty told me to go to sleep. The next morning, I was taken to the masters-at-arms’ office, which operates as a center for the ship’s police force.
My plan was to do whatever it took to get off the ship, hoping to be sent to the naval hospital and be declared unfit for the Navy. We were in the middle of San Diego Harbor, pulling out for our big voyage but not yet in open waters. When the masters-at-arms turned their backs on me, I darted away, running through the ship with Marines chasing after me. This pursuit only increased my madness and resolve. I pushed and shoved them as I ran through small passageways, screaming, “Out of my way!”
I finally made it up to the third deck and saw that the ship was moving through the water to the open sea. Marines came up behind me, yelling, “Stop right where you are!”
I ran toward the railing and saw a long drop to the water below. At this point I was on automatic pilot, and there was no turning back. Without hesitation, I flung myself over the railing with all my clothes on, including my heavy cord jacket and desert boots. After hitting the water, it was a struggle to swim with the weight of my clothes; the best I could do was tread water. Finding it hard to claim any victory as I bobbed up and down in the sea, I surrendered and was pulled back aboard by an irritated sailor who had been lowered into the water in a small boat to capture this madman.
I spent five months in all in the Navy brig, but was discharged from the Navy in January of 1966. Amazingly, I was discharged under honorable conditions, with a statement that my mind had become disordered through the use of LSD and other drugs.
While AWOL from the Navy during those thirty days, I met a girl named Laura at a party in Malibu. We spent as much of those thirty days together as we could. She was a senior in high school at the time. She had waited for me and even visited me while I was serving my five months in the Navy brig. I was astounded and moved by her loyalty and affections. After she graduated in June of 1966, we headed for Hawaii. We lived on the North Shore for about three or four months, then headed back to Southern California, where Laura got pregnant. We were married in August of 1966.
Only a few months later we found ourselves fleeing back to Hawaii, with Laura pregnant and my old using buddy Wes tagging along. Upon arrival, we bought a cheap car and headed for the North Shore. Our first two weeks were spent sleeping in parks while looking for a place to live. I smoked dope and took “reds and yellows,” which nonaddicts commonly use as sleeping pills. Every night I passed out. Nothing bothered me, including the rain and mosquitoes. I slept great. With the continuous use of drugs, I had mastered this type of nomadic existence.
In September 1967, we found an attractive little two-bedroom house just two houses from the ocean on Ke Nui Road at Sunset Beach, directly in front of a popular surfing spot called Rocky Point. The North Shore was beautiful in the sixties. The beaches were empty, with white sand, picturesque palm trees, and the most perfect waves in the world.
As we began meeting many of the people living on the North Shore, I discovered that LSD and hashish were freely available; so these became my drugs of choice. I embraced the shared experience; it became like communion with psychedelics. I felt good about not shooting dope, convincing myself that part of my life was over. I was happy to be part of the spiritual movement popular with most people in our community. A group of us regularly came together to go into the woods to meditate. We would hike up into the mountains overlooking the coastline, where you could see for miles in either direction. The waves would line up on the horizon as they pushed their way forward to the shore. It was like each wave knew its destiny, finding its way to the coastline of the North Shore near the end of its journey.
We would sit in a circle as someone read a spiritual book guiding us to higher realms of consciousness. We all wore white muslin yoga pants, considered fashionable at the time. Everyone practiced yoga and sat in the lotus position. The lotus position is a popular way to sit when meditating because it keeps your back straight. Keeping the spine erect is important and something always emphasized when learning to meditate. This was a huge problem for me, because ever since childhood, flexibility was not my friend. I couldn’t even touch my toes. I couldn’t sit in a cross-legged position, let alone in a lotus. This just added to the ever-growing separation I had first experienced in kindergarten. The drugs took away those feelings in the beginning, but not anymore.
There we all were, getting into position on the mountaintop. Since I didn’t haul a chair up the mountain with me, I found myself taking a kneeling position to maintain proper positioning.
“Okay,” I thought, “I’ve got it together: positioned properly, yoga pants on, hair is long (I hadn’t had a haircut since I was discharged from the Navy almost two years earlier), haven’t shaved. God, I’m looking good here.”
Then the reading started. Eyes closed, yet looking upward—they say this is where the third eye is, where the light is—I was high on LSD and had also smoked some marijuana. I was totally ready for the journey. About six or seven minutes into the meditation, my legs started to cramp, and I felt the circulation completely cut off.
“Ok, just listen to the prayers being read. You can transcend this feeling of pain,” I thought.
More time went on, but all I could hear were my thoughts: “I know I will never be able to walk again. I’m sure my legs are turning purple. I will have to be airlifted off the mountain. I can’t take it. I have to move, but then they will all know I’m not in a deep meditation.” At that point, though, I didn’t care. Slowly, and as quietly as I could, I changed positions. With every quiet bend, my knees would defiantly pop or lock themselves in place. Who knew enlightenment would be so painful? I had to lie down and stretch my legs out before it was too late. I lay on my back and started to extend my legs. The pain was really bad, but I got them straight, lay back, and tried to listen.
I thought, “This feels so good now. I can totally stay in this position as long as this goes on. And, hey, my back is still in a straight position.”
“I’m starting to enjoy this now. Whoops, it feels like there is a bug in my pants! Just focus, Tom. Don’t move!”
I stayed still, but I had to move again to scratch my butt. Then I had to pick my nose. “Stop it,” I shouted to my mind. “Can’t you stay focused?”
So there I lay, knowing everyone was in bliss and I was preoccupied with all these bodily sensations, when it hit me….
“God, do I have to pee! There is no way I can hold it much longer, but if I get up to go behind a tree, everyone will know that I’m incapable of meditating for any longer than a few minutes.”
As I look back on those days, I can see I was searching for something else. Something in me knew that there was a better life, and I knew meditation was one of the answers, but I couldn’t get it. First, I had to stop using. Not only did I not understand that; I didn’t know how to stop—yet.
Today I know that everyone is searching for a sense of freedom within, but when our seeking is misdirected, many of us turn to drugs, alcohol, money, relationships, or acquiring more things to fill ourselves. Our spiritual search becomes an endless, and at times terrified, hunt for fulfillment. We label people who abuse drugs and alcohol “addicts,” but isn’t craving of anything addiction? We fail to realize that all things are impermanent, and that nothing outside of us will ever take away our inner feelings of emptiness and isolation.
On a Sunday at 3:50 p.m., December 24, 1967, my daughter Celeste was born. The small one-story stucco hospital, which was built in the 1920s or 1930s and looked more like plantation housing, was located in Waialua on the North Shore of Oahu. It was nearly empty when we arrived. The doctor and nurse, who were to be in the delivery room with Laura, were the only staff there, and had asked me to watch the office and answer the phone. Were they serious? Of course I would watch the office. Turning an addict loose in a hospital is like releasing a kid in a candy store. I’m not proud to admit it, but while my daughter was being born, I was in the pharmacy stealing syringes and looking for drugs to shoot up. That feeling of being happy I’d had just a few months before was gone. It became too clear that I had no choice about shooting drugs. If I had ever had a choice, it was pushed out of the way as merely a distraction as I frantically searched the cabinets for injectable narcotics. Sadly, in an addict’s life, the drugs always come before everything else.
Celeste Noel Catton was a healthy, beautiful baby, and I was a proud father. Her birth was a good thing in my life, a very good thing; but even becoming a father couldn’t keep me clean.
Overpowering feelings of separation continued taking over my life, and I had no idea what to do about it. I kept taking drugs in an attempt to find that inner “God consciousness” I had read about in my spiritual books. Samadhi, joy, light, and love were what I knew I wanted, but my heart was running on empty. I had been running in place for too long. Despite the confusion and complete chaos in my life, I never forgot that simple line in my SRF lessons: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I thought maybe I should go to India to search for enlightenment, but the truth was I couldn’t even leave the North Shore and go to Honolulu, on the same island, let alone India.
Little did I know, my life was about to change dramatically in a way I never dreamed possible. The miracle was about to take place. The teacher was about to appear.
