Finding Oz

When I was 17, I went to Europe to find myself.  It worked.  I found myself lying in a gutter outside the Hofbrau Haus in Munich.  After draining three liters of beer, I had tried to smuggle out one of those world famous beer steins, and upon my escape, got busted by burly bar bouncers who launched me into the street like a bag of dirty laundry.

That marked the beginning, more or less, of a twenty year quest to find myself at the bottom of a beer bottle or the end of a joint.  I was disgusted with the self I found there:  jittery and sick, remorseful and afraid, and pushing relationships to the brink.  It's impossible to find yourself when the road you're on is the wrong road, a dark one-way tunnel with no exit, with the days passing with ever increasing momentum and dry-mouthed cravings for more.  As they say, I had self-will run riot.

When the whole mess finally came crashing down, the other self, my real self, surrendered to higher powers the abused and abusing impostor who had hijacked my life.  No more blackouts, no more puddles of vomit next to my bed.  No more public humiliations.  No more bouncing off the cobblestones of a foreign street.  One evening in my early recovery, I explained to my six-year-old son that I was going to meetings so that I wouldn't drink beer any more.  To which he responded, "Oh, back when you were mean to us?"  Yes, that's right, son.  No more.

That was twenty five years ago.  And, by the grace of the Source, there has been no more.  

Years ago also, the great spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, landed at his bottom.  A spiraling depression left him believing there was no escape -- he was about to commit suicide.  Eckhart said aloud to no one:  "I can't live with myself."  But this statement resonated within his true self, and proved to be revelation and his salvation.  The dualism in those words could not be denied:  Who was the "I" and who was the "myself"?  They were different selves.  He saw that his "I" could no longer co-exist with his false "self", his ego, that great fabricator of pride and emotional pain.  From that day forward, Eckhart let dissolve the slings and arrows of the false self by immersing his true self into the present moment and thus the flowering of consciousness.

About twenty years ago on an afternoon like any other, I was driving down the highway after doing some errands, alone and lost in thought as always.  Everything was quite ordinary when something quite extraordinary happened.  All thoughts in my mental churn ceased and all worries and concerns dissolved.  I landed like a feather into a state of simple observation.  No more expectancy, no more rehashing, no more grind.  As each moment unfolded I became a serene passenger in that unfolding, instead of bouncing mentally between future and past as I always had.  I felt as Dorothy must have felt when opening her door into the wonder of Oz.  I had long stopped using mind-altering chemicals, this was not a flashback, and without any external stimulus, and without even trying, I lived in the golden present for what must have been a full two hours.  I did not resist but moved through this enchanted time with calm intention.  I felt loved and loving.   My false self must have gotten locked in a closet with a sock in its mouth.  The ego, after all, abhors the present moment.

It doesn't really matter why or how this happened.  All I know is that my life of quiet desperation was given a brief reprieve from the voice in my head, the voice that insists I have serious things to worry about or harsh judgements to make.  Thoreau's famous line should be amended to:  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation because they can't stop talking to themselves."

There were thousands of moments in my drinking and drugging years when The Buzz opened me to a golden place like Oz.  Moments free of fear, regret, and confusion.  Just me and The Buzz in a kind of holy matrimony.   This is the promise and, simultaneously, the great deception of addiction:  that it would render harmless and null the pain of the false self.  With a few drinks I became Somebody, ten feet tall and confident, a smooth dancer, a lover, a man among men.

But golden moments only lasted for precious minutes, of course, and withered to expose the fraud.  I couldn't live with my sober self, so would try to drink and drug my way back to that Oz of precious golden moments.  Snared in the addict's trap, I drank and drugged to erase the suffering caused by my drinking and drugging.

But here's the thing: sobriety by itself doesn't bring peace, although it now makes peace possible.  Whether I was high as a kite in my former life, or stone-cold sober in the present one, my mind becomes lost in thought and quick to judge.  Like every other person, there's a true me and a phony me.  The sin of the true me is the failure to make the distinction, of being blind to the fact that the highs and lows of fortune and misfortune are creations of ego.  The first step is to expose the impostor which comes with simple awareness.  And there are short stretches when I feel I'm in that Oz-like place, not lost in thought, but where each moment reveals itself in a kind of beholding.  

Sometimes I look back at that drunk teenager licking cobblestones and licking his wounds in Munich, and am grateful for the road he was about to take.  He was a thief for one blurry night, but also became a victim of his own robbery for more than twenty years.  And now, twenty five years since that last drink, I am no longer trying to find myself in all the wrong places.  You can’t find by searching.  You find by freeing.