The summer after my freshman year of college, I went to north India for seven weeks with a program called Where There Be Dragons. It was partly due to a mild interest in Buddhism, of which I knew very little, and partly just wanting to see the world. I had never really experienced a Third World country. I’d been to Taiwan, Japan, and visited several countries in Europe very briefly, but my only other visit to a “developing” nation was a couple of hours in Tijuana.

The program brought together American students of high school to college ages and sent them off to various countries under the guidance of experienced travelers. There were maybe a dozen teens in our group, four guys and the rest girls. I was the oldest of the bunch, and socially the most reserved (although the title of “most socially immature” goes to Bowie, whose every other sentence was, “Your mom”).

We met on a beach in Los Angeles just before boarding a plane. The main thing I remember is that we had a talk about the way Indians wipe after using the toilet, namely, using the left hand and water. We were encouraged to try it at least once.

We flew in to Bangkok for a day, then to Delhi, and took a bus up to Dharamsala. Though nominally this was a trip to India, it was focused culturally on the culture of Tibetan Buddhists, and as most people know, Dharamsala is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, as it has been since the Dalai Lama fled the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959.

I could tell lots of stories of what it was like in India from the perspective of a clueless American, but for now I’ll stick to the theme.

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I had some interest in the paranormal ever since childhood. I remember having one of those dream dictionaries, you know, where you dreamed about underwear so you look up “underwear” and it tells you that it means you need to examine the underside of your life, or something. I remember reading that on the way to church sometimes.

One of my best friends to this day, Paul, I met in middle school, and one of the things we bonded around was our mutual interest in the paranormal. We had this book called Astral Projection, by Denning and Phillips, that, scandalously, had a picture of a naked woman floating up “astrally” from her sleeping, clothed self. (I’m sure that didn’t affect our decision to get it!) It prescribed lots of chakra visualizations, among other things. I never got anything out of it, but it was my first attempt at anything close to magic.

I tried hard to have lucid dreams, too — they’re dreams where you realize you’re dreaming, while you’re still in the dream. I read about them in Omni magazine and had to try them out, and eventually started having them with some frequency.

One day my mom offered to buy me some books out of a Barnes & Noble catalog. I chose a couple. She rejected the one on Masonic conspiracies, but let me buy Out-of-Body Adventures by Rick Stack. (Amusingly, I recall that my motivation for choosing that book wasn’t for any particular reason of paranormal interest; it was because I had a huge crush on a girl who lived out of state, and wanted to be able to visit her.)

That turned out to be quite the turning point for me. I didn’t get that much out of the book itself, but it made repeated reference to the Seth material. So I went to my local library and there were a bunch of books by Seth. I dove in.

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Until the age of 13 or 14 I was a devout Christian.

My mother was and is a devout Christian, whereas my father was and is a casual agnostic (meaning, he doesn’t really care). My mother is, as far as I can tell, nondenominational in her belief, but gravitates toward other Taiwanese Christians — much easier where she’s living now, in California, than back in Kansas where I grew up.

Some of my early childhood memories are of going to Friday night Bible study at the house of Margaret, a local Taiwanese woman who was a Mennonite. She always wore one of those bonnets and she was, from what I can recall, very very nice. Her daughter Elsa was our regular babysitter. Obviously, no great or even small religious understandings among the kindergarten-age set, but I simply learned early on that this is just what normal people did weekly — go to something called “Bible study.” Of course all the kids would play while the adults were having their serious discussion so it was actually pretty fun.

Alas, at the time there there was no Taiwanese church in Kansas, or maybe there was and we just chose not to go for some reason, I don’t recall. Instead, we attended a nice formal “normal” church, a very grand institutional-looking edifice called the First Southern Baptist Church.

I remember wondering, with some awe, if they were really the very first Southern Baptist Church!

For a kid, I think I took church pretty seriously. I went diligently most Sundays. I tried very hard to think clean thoughts. I said nightly prayers, unprompted. I was, from one point of view, very pious, and from another, a Jesus nerd.

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I’ve always had spiritual inclinations. And when I say always, I mean even as a little kid. It certainly influenced me that my mother was as well, but even independently I think there was always an underlying thirst for wisdom and insight into deeper reality.

I remember once, as a child of maybe eight years, looking out from my front yard, watching a car go by, and, being struck suddenly by the hugeness and the power of that metal beast, for some reason I imagined it hitting someone — how soft human flesh is, how easily it could be crushed. I said to my mother, very seriously, “People are fragile, aren’t they?” (Yes, I used the word “fragile.” I was a precocious kid.) She looked back at me consideringly, then said, “Yes, they are.”

It’s safe to say, then, that I’ve consciously been on a quest for deeper truths and higher knowledge for most of my life. When it comes to exploration of spirituality and religion, I’ve traversed a fair bit of territory in search for a belief system and set of practices that were the right fit for me. Most of it has been pretty unconventional, and I pleased at where I’ve gotten to thus far.

But still, at this point in my life, I find something missing, and I’m not quite sure how to get at it. I’ve built and solidified a certain foundation, but in that foundation find some elements missing. What’s missing primarily consists of a specific and systematic method of engaging the violent world, that I previously and anthropomorphically termed the Tyrant, and moreover, a purpose to do so.

I feel that I’ve come a long way in beginning to understand my relationship with a transcendent Divine Spirit, and yet my relationship with that same Spirit as manifested immanently in everything “mundane” and “profane” is as yet lacking. That’s the next phase.

In looking forward, then, I think it might be useful first to look back, to revisit where I came from, what I believed and practiced, what I valued, what might still be back there for me to mine for more, and what is rightly left behind. Just to consolidate my gains, and to take a breather and have a little fun reminiscing before I plunge ahead.

And just to be clear, not too many people read this blog. (I know, through the magic of blog stats. My wife doesn’t count.) So I’m under no illusions that this is of terrible interest to anybody but me! Nevertheless, here I go.

According to Castaneda’s hierarchy, there were many different levels of tormentors called “petty tyrants,” but at the top it was just the Tyrant, “the primal source of energy, the one and only ruler in the universe.” I’d never really connected with that idea; it seemed so self-hating to conceptualize what is, essentially, God, or at least the God of this world, as a “Tyrant.”

But today I realized suddenly that it seems to fit. Above and beyond my conflict with my landlord, I step back and look at my life and realize that I do not like it. And the main reason I don’t like it is that many things in it are difficult, challenging, unpredictable, disempowering, and violent. In short, if I were to anthropomorphize and simplify my entire set of life circumstances, I could say that it acts like a tyrant.

And when I look at other religious traditions, they actually say something similar. What’s the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, after all? “Life is suffering.” In some strains of Christian gnosticism, part of their mythology says that “humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect god, the demiurge.” Even among mainstream Christianity the sense is often that the devil governs this world of matter much more closely than God does, and that all humans are tainted with “original sin.”

The Matrix illustrated this by showing, not just individuals, but the whole system, the entirety of what is accepted as “reality” as in fact part of the Tyrant.

It’s not a matter of me believing these things, it’s that they are useful and accurate descriptions of my experience.

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When I left [the College of] William and Mary I was shell-shocked. Because when you’re in college it’s very clear what you have to do to succeed. And I imagine here everybody knows exactly the number of credits they needed to graduate, where they had to buckle down, which introductory psychology class would pad out the schedule. You knew what you had to do to get to this college and to graduate from it. But the unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. The paths are infinite and the results uncertain. And it can be maddening to those that go here, especially here, because your strength has always been achievement. So if there’s any real advice I can give you it’s this.

College is something you complete. Life is something you experience. So don’t worry about your grade, or the results or success. Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency.

- Jon Stewart, 2004 Commencement Address

“Petty tyrant” is a term that, as far as I know, originated in the works of Carlos Castaneda. Fraud though he may have been, his words and concepts continue to provide me with occasional inspiration.

The idea is that in the world, the ultimate tyrant is life and death itself, fate, destiny, karma, etc. Those are the things that, in the end, truly rule one’s life. All other persons and circumstances that cause suffering are lesser — therefore “petty” tyrants.

“A petty tyrant is a tormentor … someone who holds the power of life and death over warriors, or simply annoys them to distraction.”

I’m going through an experience with a petty tyrant right now, which is bringing this concept to the fore.

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