There were perhaps about fifty people in attendance. Max wore stylish Chinese clothes and a wide bracelet on his wrist. The bracelet, upon being removed on a later occasion, revealed a deep scar that looked as though someone had once tried to severe his hand with an ax and nearly succeeded. Which didn’t seem to interfere with its strength and speed when Max delivered a cannonball-loud slapping Hot Palm treatment to one of the participants, pummeling away at his bare torso as though trying to demolish a prohibition on corporal punishments.

The eight hours spread over two days — Kunlun level I seminar, which is where I went (there was also a level II seminar for people who had practiced the first one for a minimum of six months) — proved eventful.

Now then. I have never worked for personnel and have never handled benefits, but one thing I know: I’m not someone who will give a controversial teacher the benefit of the doubt until he or she has somehow earned this benefit. I view an experiential tabula rasa with implicit suspicion. Any which claims anyone might write on it, I would want validated somehow. Tell me, show me, get me to feel it, get me to get it. Not in my mind though… Get me to get it with my life, with the very aliveness of me. I don’t care about any other kinds of “proof.”

On the other hand, I’m not someone who makes up her mind in advance about anything (took a while to learn not to), particularly about certain things supposedly being once and for all, for all purposes and for all eternity, impossible. No. There’s no such thing as impossible things; if you think there is, you haven’t been paying attention to the universe. Miracles? I’m all for miracles, I don’t think our world could emerge on any other, non-miraculous premise. It is not the outcome of a logical process; it is not a rational thing that anyone can account for by any rational arguments; it is inherently miraculous. Anyone who believes that “anything is possible” is a wrong statement holds a flaky belief with no basis in reality.

Now miracle workers, especially professional, money-making miracle workers, are a different matter altogether. I trust the miraculous universe; it doesn’t mean being gullible, it means being reasonable. I don’t so readily trust miracle workers, neither great nor small. People are not, generally speaking, trustworthy. People who make money doing whatever they are doing are particularly non-trustworthy. It’s the nature of the human beast. I don’t trust the so-called “modern scientists” either. If someone withholds or takes away their research grant unless they lie, they lie. If someone guarantees no career advancement ever unless they lie, they lie. If someone orchestrates peer pressure unless they lie, they lie. If someone… and someone always does.

What’s “proof?..”

Of anything?..

To me, it is as non-linear as the world I find myself in. Proof is a pattern, a tapestry, a piece of brocade, a dance, a symphony, a meaningful congruence between what you question and what life answers. If it’s step by step, it’s not a dance — it’s a marching army, and an army always marches toward death. Note by note, it’s not a symphony — it’s the tinkering of an ignoramus who owns the instrument but has never learned how to play. Argument by argument, it’s no proof!

Proof is time-sensitive. A post-factum “I told you so” is not it, anymore than an a priori “I believe.” Proof is space-sensitive, place-sensitive. In China, “fear of cold” is a disease a patient will complain of and the doctor will treat; the patient is not expected to prove she suffers from the “fear of cold,” the doctor is not expected to suspect a lie, and the proof is in the pulse. Our PDR doesn’t contain such a disease. Do Chinese patients and doctors alike lie then? To whom? To themselves? To each other? To us? To god?..

Proof is, then, space-time sensitive, but… Our reality is not comprised of space-time only. There’s things beyond — like intent, like co-creation, like dream-dimensions, like tao…

Proof ends where reality begins. Only unreal things can be “proved,” and measurements that “prove” can only be taken in frozen, stopped, dead environments, under “controlled” conditions, under formaldehyde. Life and its theoretical variety known as the afterlife don’t yield to the “prove it” demand. Life has nothing to prove.

The first thing I will notice about a teacher is whether he or she is sufficiently alive. We’ve all had teachers, not of our own choosing, who were not — my own memories of such teachers stretch all the way back to kindergarten. A spontaneous, uninhibited child will learn playfully and play while learning; most teachers are prepared to nip this learning mode in the bud, and are themselves the outcome of similar “nipping,” and consequently, adults are overwhelmingly bad at this, i.e. at learning in this most effortless and most efficient manner. We have all been taught way too much by people, and via methods, that couldn’t deliver the lesson without simultaneously arresting our physical, intellectual, spiritual development. I think one thing Max is aware of, and perhaps even slightly rebellious against, is that many in his audience need to unlearn the learning styles they had been indoctrinated in, ones that necessitate bartering your freedom for the teaching.

I say “slightly” because, on the other hand, there’s no taoist learning without discipline. Cultivation is discipline, and freedom, paradoxically enough, only comes into structure, not into chaos. Show me someone whose life is chaotic and free, whose mind is in disarray and free — and I will behold a miracle far greater than a saber-toothed hummingbird. However, there’s a difference between form that has to be strong enough and reliable enough to hold an extremely volatile substance so as to gather it together in one place and keep it from dissipating — and form for formality’s sake, for the sake of arresting spontaneity and freedom. There’s a difference between the spacious and vast albeit formal taoist robes and a straightjacket. So even if Max showed up clad in full regalia the way he used to, I would have no objections. If, however, he was someone who could wave his sleeves but couldn’t move his mind to embrace an unexpected in-the-moment question or event in the audience with the kind of relaxed confidence that comes as spontaneous non-practice, on the breezy wings of uninhibited self-expression, only to those who have practiced a lot, I would begrudge him everything else. I would hold everything against a rigidly indoctrinated teacher — or one who is afraid to deviate from a routine because he knows too little to venture into uncharted territory. Max proved to be neither.

What about the opposite pitfall then, the possibility of flakiness, of anything-goes-ness, of clowning around so as to win over the audience at any cost, including the cost to one’s own dignity?.. No. Didn’t fall into that one either.

But what about self-aggrandation, puffed up self-importance?.. Nope.

Cult-in-the-making brainwashing techniques?.. None, although something that qualifies as “suggestions” was used — but it’s impossible to grasp any discipline whose success is contingent on the co-creation between the art and the artist, the practitioner and the practice, the medium and the message, without some suggestive impulse, a nudge to one’s intent, and some — gasp — faith. Faith is poor main course but excellent spice; it does facilitate digestion of any material it is applied to and it does increase its nurturing value. So… a bit of that. OK, maybe a lot. After all we were talking magic nonstop when the practice itself wasn’t going on, in between the sittings — Max and the audience were talking magic, and I loved being somewhere where it’s taking place. Where things magical are discussed technically, where talking the fine points of communication with plants versus communication with your higher self within yourself is talking shop. Do this, don’t do that, if you do this, you might wind up having this happen, and you don’t want it. Only take a psychedelic if you can whisper to the mushroom to release its medicine into you without eating it or even touching it of even coming close! Only run the microcosmic orbit that has arisen spontaneously! If the woman calls herself a “white tigress,” it means a guy should listen — listen closely — tigress… means, “be careful!” I would really love for some of my high school or college teachers to sit in on the lessons I was learning… I visualize their faces and start giggling — all that time and effort they wasted on trying to give me a solid formal education, that I may wind up learning how to blow into a mudra to retrieve a lost key or summon a wayward friend!..

Once you’ve decided to participate in something like this, after the initial process of vascillating between “why should I — why don’t I” has yielded a “let’s do it and see what happens,” there’s three possible ways you can go. You can place your entire conscious awareness outside, keep your analytical facilities busy, watch others, draw whatever conclusions from whatever you notice. Or you can let the process draw you in, ignore “others” and focus on what’s going on with you, then lose the “observer” altogether and become the process. And, finally, you can shuttle between the two modes, in and out of the inner and the outer, there and back, now a researcher, now a guinea pig, and occasionally both at once.

The first mode, that of an “objective” observer, does not interest me one bit, because it is so inefficient in dealing with live phenomena. No one has the right to claim “objectivity” because anything you perceive is invariably filtered through the prism of you, personally, and pretending that you are not there and the data collect themselves is not merely “reductionist” but, if you think of it for a moment, tragically ridiculous — hilariously preposterous — just plain idiotic. You were there, researcher, observer, data collector! You made a dent in what you were researching, observing, collecting! You are the dent! Quit denying it and respect your own presence in the space-time continuum and beyond, and stop milking your silly objectivity cow with her tortured, dry udder that can only nourish delusions — for “objectivity” is the biggest delusion of them all, the lie to end all lies.

So my choice was between the two remaining modes — but actually, I didn’t have to choose. At an earlier time in my life, I’ve been trained in dividing my awareness and simultaneously being aware of the way my awareness is divided at any given moment — not unlike the way you spread your physical weight between the “full” and the “empty” legs in taijiquan, on a fluid, constantly shifting sliding scale that allows you to even talk “percentages” — eighty-five percent on the right, fifteen on the left, ninety percent yin, ten percent yang, ninety-nine percent “here,” one percent “there…” So for me, the whole seminar was, among other things, a practice in this kind of shifting. I was aware of what’s going on with others; then not — ninety-nine percent not, eighty-five percent not, fifty percent — then aware again, ninety percent outside, ten percent inside “my own stuff” — then the inner, “my own” expanding, engulfing most, almost all, all of my presence — then an interruption from the outside and I’m back there, with the rest of you and out of me. That sort of presence.

So — what was going on outside, what was going on inside, and what was going on in the mysterious realm that is neither — that is, instead, the ever-shifting border between being and becoming?..

The best I can do with observations collected in the above-mentioned manner is present a series of glimpses. Glimpses of Max, his assistants, the students, myself, the practice. I focus on one, then the other, then all, then none — and I notice…

Glimpses of Max. I watch his posture closely, and am satisfied. He lives in his body comfortably and manifests a presence of self-acceptance and authority. His head is shaved, and a student of phrenology could perhaps derive some information from the cranial configuration on display — but he asserts the practice makes the bones of the skull movable, and the shape will change and keep changing and won’t be “frozen” in one particular position. Is it true? I watch closely. When he works on one of the students, apparently producing some deeply felt effects that show up on the surface as slow at first, then faster, then oscillating, high-speed, wide-amplitude vibration of the student’s whole body, not voluntary, no, the amplitude and the speed are like nothing one can “do” — as Max is doing his “thing,” whatever it is, do I notice the back of his head change its shape? The bump right there, at the outside of the visual cortex — does it bulge out, does it look different than it did only minutes before? I’m sure it does. Does it?.. I’m not sure…

Glimpses of the audience. Some, like me, are learning Kunlun for the first time, others have been practicing for a while. Some of the “initiates” can be spotted immediately by the effects of the practice that set in as soon as they get down to it: they don’t behave like “normal” people do. I’ve seen it before, I’ve been this way before. Another time, another teaching, an opening — into the levels of personality, emotions, physical motion, self-expression not occurring in “normal” everyday life.

The layers of repressed “me,” once they start sloughing off, revealing the “actual me” underneath, are multiple and as varied as people themselves. Some of these layers are paper-thin and easily pierced, while others are brick walls, concrete dams, powerfully reinforces structures of holding-back. Most are erected below the level of everyday consciousness, and people carrying them around don’t know they do. They feel burdened but they externalize the feeling and don’t look inside for what it is that’s really burdening them. We start noticing these structures for the first time only when they are beginning to crumble. What’s underneath? What’s behind the wall?

Long ago, when by the emperor’s decree they started building the Great Wall of China, some taoists said, this is not good… it will break the back of the dragon, and now things the dragon was supporting with her breath will start deteriorating, running out of breath, dying. The wall cut across a unified ecosystem, a grasshopper lost his mate, a butterfly was thwarted in his flight, a tigress got cut off from her watering hole… the deer multiplied beyond what the tigress would have allowed, the trees whose bark got eaten off by the oversized herd died, the rivulet they used to protect, holding the banks in the embrace of their roots, got overpowered with mud slides and dried up, the great river that it used to nourish receded, killing fish, black and white swans that used to hunt for the fish, men and women who used to have enough to eat and suddenly, or eventually, didn’t anymore. An inner Great Wall does much the same thing to the mind, body, soul, and destiny of a human being. And when there’s many walls, when a lifetime is spent erecting them — some paper-thin like the Japanese screen doors, some deep and invasive enough to “break the dragon’s back” — everything starts dying, in a chain reaction of inhibition of what could have been, should have been, being replaced by what shouldn’t have happened, couldn’t have been good… but did come to pass, to usurp the place of some natural unfolding cut off by the wall, because nature abhors vacuum.

When these walls start to crumble, they release the trapped memories, the thwarted potentials, and a whole lot of confusion. Here, a tender flower finds its footing in the proper soil for the first time in centuries; there, an enraged, starved tiger rushes out with a mighty roar… amidst clouds of dust and shards of glass and the howling of the wind that has waited to make its way to the other side for so long, rushing into the opening, turning everything in its way upside down. That’s what I’ve seen before, and now I’m seeing it again. A woman starts laughing like a demon, then whimpering, baby-like, then speaking in a language unknown, unheard of, about her long-lost purpose. Another one screams piercingly and startles me out of the beginning phase of my meditation; no one turns to look. A heavy thud behind me! This time I do turn to look. A very tall man with shoulder-length blond hair is on the floor on his back, twitching, struggling, coughing, gagging, neck tensed up so tight it looks like it might snap, toes curving inward the way they did when he was being born. I’ve seen it before. I’m thinking, uh-oh. This practice gets all the way down to the limbic system. To the R-complex. To pre-cortical systemic somatosensory memory. To jing. To all the traumas endured by the infant, and perhaps the fetus. To birth. I do hope there’s safety valves built into the system. I do hope people know how to use them. I could help if they didn’t. OK, back to minding my own business…

So I sit and follow instructions. I have hardly ever meditated sitting in a chair — every which way but in a chair, mostly in full lotus, sometimes lying down, often in movement. I have something against chairs. I once saw a photograph of an African boy sitting high in a mighty tree, on a thick branch, squatting, butt lower than feet, knees under chin, exuding relaxed comfort and peace. I used to be fond of climbing trees as a kid and finding positions to relax in that were “accidental chairs,” all of them different and unique — some supported me along one side, some had to be straddled like horses or camels, some allowed me to find balance only in firm embrace, some turned me into a Vitruvian girl… Ordinary chairs never appealed to my sense of the sacred, and at one point I even invented and created a “shamanic chair” to meditate in — I used pieces of black sheepskin and arctic fox fur from a retired jacket, and feathers and beads and gourd rattles and sewn cloth dolls to decorate it — but even the most supportive of my family members, upon seeing it, thought I’d gone too far (”you’ve finally lost it, haven’t you?”), so I got upset and dismantled it. I’ll make it again though, now that Max says you get your best kunlun if you sit on an animal fur rug. To which I might add, in a chair of your personal design, as weird and uncalled-for as it might look to others.

I also hardly ever meditate to music. At the seminar, it was loud, but I didn’t seem to mind, the flow of sounds and sights was benign, nothing bothered me, not even the fact that after every break (there were breaks following each of the four introduced segments of the practice) I had to look for my flip-flops, which happened to have been synchronistically chosen to match the colorful carpet on the floor to the point of complete camouflage invisibility — navy blue, red, dark yellow — all the shades incorporated in the carpet were not merely close but an exact replica of the ones I came in wearing on my feet, so every time I removed the flip-flops, someone would kick them while walking past me, and they would immediately blend in and disappear. I don’t know why I’m adding all these secondary details — perhaps to generate a somewhat multidimensional picture, a “been there done this and that” kind of credibility. Done this and that, important and unimportant, been there and back, attended to the mundane and the mysterious, and so it came to pass.

Sitting, holding the mudra, eyes closed. Max came up from behind, gently touched my closed eyes and the top of my head, and said something that I heard as “you have a top secret.” He didn’t really say that. I do have a top secret though, but could he possibly sense it right away, just like that?.. Ah, the power of self-hypnosis. Max didn’t do it, I did it to myself. We all do, one way or the other, and from what I heard, so do gods, for what is creation itself if not self-hypnosis of some infinitely mighty spirit that had fallen under the infinitely powerful spell of her own making?.. For the rest of the seminar, I was caught on my own hook, and gently, and then violently, it led me toward hope. I have a top secret. I live in hope of encountering someone who is capable of deciphering it. Hope is dope…

Kunlun itself, after the Red Phoenix and the Golden Flower (no, not the one from the book by the same name, Max says, the book has nothing!) and Spirit Travel, started to the wild, mesmerizing, unexpected, almost inhuman Mongolian music. Oh, it was the best choice ever. Almost instantly, I was propelled into some past of my recurrent visions — dreams? past life memories? genetic recall? fantasy? — boundless steppe, smooth rhythmic speed, a view from atop a proud and dangerous horse, freedom, freedom, freedom. Everything in me rushed forward, in that direction, out and away from here and now, out of this time, out of this place, out of this modern me. “Looks like you’re trying to give birth,” Max commented. Yes — to myself. I’ve once seen an ancient Native American statuette of the Moon Goddess giving birth to herself, she wasn’t serene, she was raw with effort, teeth bared and clenched, features distorted, body convoluted… what do men know, I thought. How can you break into another dimension — of spirit, creation, knowledge, freedom — anything — while just sitting there looking serene and peaceful like a buddha?.. Well, maybe later. Alchemy does get subtler, but don’t try to make it subtle until it is ready. You always start with raw material, and that Mongolian tune, as devoid of all artificiality as the dawn of time, is my witness. So I let an irreverent thought pass — “what do you know about birth you have to give to yourself, not everybody gets struck by lightning at the age of six, some of us get struck by an open palm of a very unenlightened being at that age, smack across the face, and this is something we have to remember and forget, remember and forget –” — I lose the thought, lose the interest in thinking, and ride my wind horse into Genghis Khan’s land.

I will have to digress again. I had teachers and learned avidly on my own, from nature and books and people, from meditations and deep feelings and mistakes… and the summer of 2001 found me in a state of bliss. Yes, what seems to be the promise of kunlun — “how much bliss can you take” — happened to me via other means, other methods, then mostly spontaneously, and once it started unfolding, there was no stopping it.

It overwhelmed me and it kept intensifying every day. Finally, in the early days of September, I called a guy in NYC (I was living in NJ at the time), a practitioner of one of my arts who was equipped to help me take the edge off the overload of feelings. I was supposed to get together with him the morning of September 11th. I would have to take a train to the WTC station. That train never came, for reasons everybody knows.

My friend’s phone was dead for the next two weeks, but I didn’t need that session anymore. Everything changed. From the place of revelation, I knew what happened, I mean what really happened, on the level of those invisible winds that shape worlds, “the shape of the mountains reveals the shape of the wind,” as a Zen poem put it — the shape of the skyscrapers, ditto. I knew that wind. Shuddering, I listened to it howl in the space between heaven and humanity, earth and humanity, isolating, destroying. I knew there would be nowhere to go with my little personal problem — too much overwhelming bliss — for a long, long time. My bliss was no longer an emergency, and I knew it would fizzle out. I knew now why I got a taste of it in the shape and form that I did: it intensified to the point of unmanageability precisely because it was getting ready to flip over into its opposite, and I knew this opposite would engulf the planet, not just my very own lower dantien that, on the morning of that fateful day, started whispering its warnings into my mind’s ear — hushed and apologetic at first, then harsh and urgent, then…

Then came a few years that were the most difficult by far in all of my life. I eventually emerged like the phoenix from the ashes, carrying those who depended on me on my char-broiled wings, and found myself weakened, tired, humbled… and silent inside. Everything that used to be attuned within me, was now haywire. Everything that used to excite me, I could now merely half tolerate. With the exception of a few people I loved who needed me and who would most certainly give a damn, I didn’t see anything worth getting worked up about, living for, or dying for. Planet Earth became a drag to be on. Between compassion and contempt, I didn’t get to feel much of anything else when faced with my fellow humans, and that’s such a narrow band of reactions… I still tried doing things I used to pour my heart and soul into, but now mostly on autopilot. I forced myself to do things I vaguely remembered I used to love. Now it was just an exercise in self-discipline — out of some stubbornness I didn’t want to surrender all of my values even though I couldn’t for the life of me feel them as valuable anymore.

Doomsday scenarios, once their audiences, courtesy of youtube, began to grow exponentially, promptly turned into yet another form of entertainment for the masses, with men, women, children, animals all acting as a bunch of obliging extras in some cheap horror movie. Perhaps they — we — deserve what’s upon us, I was thinking. No one has the energy and the enthusiasm to do anything tangible except for the evil ones. Everyone else sits back and watches the show. Or, rather, the previews. Look how relaxed they are, how unperturbed. How confident that it’s just a movie. No wonder their movie is almost upon us. We all wanted to be some kind of stars… and some kind of stars we are going to be. Red or blue? Used to be yellow… but the directors of the show have all of the rainbow at their service now.

Doomsday songs, written long ago by visionaries and prophets who thought they were merely artists, kept whispering in my mind’s ear, chanting, mumbling, shrieking, intertwining… “Two suns in the sunset — Could be/The human race/is run?..” “There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code,/Your private life will suddenly explode…” “Señor, Señor, can you tell me where we’re headed — /Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?..” “And as the windshield melts/And my tears evaporate,/Leaving only charcoal to defend…” “You’ll see a woman hanging upside down,/Her features covered by her fallen gown,/And all the lousy little poets coming round/Trying to sound like Charlie Manson…” “Señor, Señor, let’s disconnect these cables,/overturn these tables,/this place don’t make no sense to me no more…” “Finally I understand/the feelings of the few:/Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend –/we will all equal in the end…” “The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold/and it’s overturned the order of the soul…”

So what Max told me on the second day of the seminar, when I went “all the way” with the feeling — of, not bliss, but history, my personal history and the history of our kind, the humankind –

what he noticed, what he saw, what he did, what he transmitted, I don’t know, but what he said, I do know — my eyes were closed and I heard it with my mind’s ear, somewhere in the lower dantien –

what he said into the depth of my opening to kunlun, had to be… it had to be a certain specific message… I mean, these are no ordinary times, in that no one’s projected destiny is extraordinary anymore unless transformed miraculously, via some superhuman, inhuman, supreme effort and supernatural luck… barring that, it’s all the same for everybody and it’s going to be business as usual to face the impossible… I mean, what could Max say to someone like me, to what I came with, to where I was coming from?..

There had to be the kind of promise in his words that my lower dantien would accept, and what it accepts or declines, my intellect has no say in. It had to be willing to listen, for starters — and then it would have to inform me whether it believes what it heard.

The last segment on the second day, kunlun, started out with an outburst of laughter when Chris, in response to Max’s request for Mongolian music, turned on a momentous blast of “yummy yummy yummy love in my tummy” instead. There it is again, breaking the habit of a solemn sitting — why solemn? Strangely enough, after years of practicing this and that, the most difficult thing to master might prove this fine balance you want to strike between taking the practice seriously but not really, and taking yourself seriously but not really. Max asserts that if you take what you’re doing too seriously, focus too intently, you will frown, and a frown locks the crown — and a smile opens it. All right. Yummy, yummy, yummy… funny, really funny… then abruptly, the low guttural growl of the Mongolian singer, and the steppe looks very different today… I feel obstructed. Can’t go forward, can’t go back. Can’t stay, can’t go. Can’t stay, can’t go, the memory of –

oh, an early one, a very, very early one — and my body knows what it’s about. Go with it? Yeah. No choice by now. “Much better today,” I hear Max comment. I don’t care. I don’t care what it looks like to an outside observer. When I go with a feeling, I go with a feeling, and if the feeling is can’t go can’t stay can’t go can’t stay, there’s only one way to go with it:

on the floor, in the fetal position, from the symbolic “trying to give birth to myself” of yesterday to the real-life memory of trying to get born. I remember, everything in me remembers, and I’m alone and obstructed and fighting for my life in my every cell.

Max touches me and the coiled spring my body had turned into is released — shoots out — every cell trying to express its need. He says a few words, the right ones, the very words to say, the promise, the right kind of promise, I hope he delivers, I don’t know yet. “What are you feeling?” he asks. I can’t say it, I can’t speak. Can’t you read body language? I’m saying it, but not in words!.. “Say it…” I make an effort, I know I can only give a very feeble approximation with words — “the thought enunciated is a lie,” as a Russian poet put it. “I just want to be free,” I finally manage to declare. I hear a few people laugh, I think Max is among them.

A break is announced immediately after that. We are encouraged to socialize. Wrong moment for me to socialize, I’m still pretty wide open, and closing down properly is a priority. I find a remote corner with a silk tree decorating it, crouch behind the tree, back against the wall, hands over bellybutton, whoa, this is an unfamiliar way to get me through a familiar feeling, is it going to work or will I have to use my own safety valves?.. I don’t know yet. I know one thing though: there’s no such thing as a “safe, efficient” transformative practice. It is either safe. Or it is efficient. If you are after something that can’t possibly go wrong, take up the art of slicing soup. Don’t use a sharp knife though. Use your imagination.