Wah Yantee - The Chariot of Sleep

First published  September 15, 2013

Wah Yantee.

If I tell you what I have found, you won’t believe me, you’ll think it the strangest thing I have ever said. After all I have said and written and done, you’ll think I’ve finally lost my mind. But the truth is, after so many years it had to happen. Though I was searching, I turned my back on every answer. Maybe I argued too much, maybe I knew the truth was inside me but I sought confirmation. I needed one other soul to understand me, and know what I was knowing. I looked for years, and I found friendship, I found different kinds of love, but the one who could name it, who understood, never appeared, though I sometimes wonder if I met her once, just once, in Ruthann (and may be why I wrote “Cloud Vaporizing” a couple of months ago). I kept looking outside where there’s no meaning, no contact with what matters, and never expected, never thought, to look inside me. 

It wasn’t easy, to ask questions of those I trusted, those who claimed to be in touch with Other, those who claimed to be in command of their lives and their souls, yet offered only empty platitudes and false explanations. Friends distanced themselves when it seemed to them all I desired was to cause trouble, to challenge their faith and to hurt them. The truth is, I wanted acceptance and to accept what they told me, but my conscience and instincts wouldn’t let me fall in line. I couldn’t obey blindly. I knew death was coming, someday, some way, and that I needed to be ready. I needed to know what was coming and how to prepare. Not for fire and judgment and virgins and angels and black empty eternity and all that bullshit. For the real thing. For the places I’ve been seeing in my journeys on the Chariot of Sleep my whole life, for the renunciation of my mistakes and the full acceptance of a me who has never impressed me.

Then it happened. I cannot tell you what it was- not yet. But I know this: all those visions and dreams, the places I knew were real as the sunset, as far away as the universe, and so familiar I knew they were inside me, were coming to life. It won’t be long now until I see them.

And as for my books and short stories, the fame and influence I thought they would bring are an illusion to me now— they always were. I’ve given them form; I realize now they were, and are, a practice I needed and need to do continuously. It’s how I reveal who I am, who I was all along. In search of my own voice: the irony of that title, that piece of material! I wrote it just before it happened, as if it were an unconscious prelude.  And there’s the paradox: to reach what seems farthest away, what seems most elusive and impossible, I needed to turn within. The answers were here all the time, inside me.

For decades, I sought love and I sought freedom. I traveled widely, I traveled for real and in my mind. I traveled alone and in the spirit. I walked with the rising sun, chanting, soft music in my mind- a kind of prayer for the day, following a trail of breadcrumbs to those three red words- Follow . . . Your . . . Heart, discovering the sound of my own voice. I fell in love with the idea of being in love. I listened and read what the great thinkers had to say- about humankind, about God, about religion, about love and history and the mind and the soul and cells and stars and . . . 

It was too much to bear, so I determined to figure it out for myself. I had to set out on my own; I couldn’t live my life for other people and their dogmas. I kept on searching and teaching- searching and teaching things I knew nothing about -always asking questions and pissing people off, not getting answers, only inherited opinions and poorly formed philosophies based on fear: fear of rejection, fear of dying, fear of standing out in a crowd and daring to face God alone. I spent my lifetime trying to explain how I felt, looking for someone who understood the loneliness of knowing the truth is inside you and can’t be grasped, or learned, or purchased. Knowing it warms you, gives you comfort, yet looks nothing like anything outside you, in the world, in the clouds, in the faces of the people you know. Feeling no one in the world knows or understands how you feel. I wonder if you know everything when you die? was a question I was going to have to find the answer to on my own.

I eschewed the Big Three of the West and turned my eyes toward Buddha, but he said, in essence, “Don’t depend on me.” My quest was hopeless, the answers seeping out only through my stories, and even then I knew that the book I was meant to write had yet to take form- all the others were just warm-ups, Holy Fire being the one novel that dove deepest into the questions.

And then, one night, something happened. The crazy thing is, I don’t remember what it was, or how it came about. All I know is that I think I’ve found what I was looking for; now I’m paying attention. But don’t get excited; you won’t like my explanation. It won’t match anything you believe in. It had to happen; it was destined to be, but it was an experience meant for me and me alone. Yours is yours, hers is hers, theirs are theirs.

Until now, nothing much in this world impressed me. Now, I am aware. Now I am moving toward a calm lake, the source of existence, and I have never- never -felt more in tune with the meaning of my existence. I have never felt more at peace, never happier. Never have I felt more detached from the world I inhabit.

Many times for many years I worried about why I was here and why I was given the privilege of living the stories I share. Stories that give me everything I have and lead me down a path toward the joy that awaits me at the edge of that cool, mystic lake.

I am a star; I am eternal. Here and now, then and then. Less for me, more for you. Finishing the prelude, then writing the book I was meant to write. And then? The question will be answered.

Singing:

My mistake is thinking I have time;

I am not yours, I am not mine.