Preview page fifteen - Life Is Divine Play: My Life and Training with Enlightened Masters

Life Is Divine Play on Facebook

So there I was, a naive young man, spoiled by an effortless life, never knowing anything but fun, on his own in the big city for the first time. Every night I watched my uncle and his PhD friends sit around in his small apartment drinking themselves into incoherence while discussing “the great issues of life.” His apartment was only 12’ x 20’ with not much of value in it, yet he protected it with three locks and a huge iron bar that slipped into place after we locked the apartment from the outside. None of that helped much, because when we returned after a long weekend, we discovered thieves had cut the huge metal bar out of the door with a welding torch! Nothing like life in the big city.

During the day, I apprenticed in a huge advertising agency where the director had frequent bouts of hitting himself on the forehead due to the stress of his job. After a few months of listening to society’s intellectual elite mumbling to themselves after a few extra dry martinis, and one day watching our art director being carried out of the agency on a stretcher, it occurred to me that playing and parties and sex were not the basis of everyone’s life. And where was the elusive, perpetual bliss I was seeking? A personal crisis ensued.

While trying to make sense of all the pain and pain avoidance I was seeing around me, my problem was exacerbated by my uncle encouraging me to read Dostoevsky, Sartre, Neitzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard and all the rest of the existentialists. While appreciating their honesty about the absurdity of life, they were of no help to me at that time. Honorable suicide seemed to be the only rational solution to living an authentic life. So I did the next best thing to killing myself… I moved to Queens. God, what a boring place that was. I compensated for that stupid decision by hanging out in the chess houses in the Village until the wee hours of the morning.

I fancied myself a good chess player in those days because at Penn State our male dorms were directly across the street from the female dorms and both our eight-story buildings had the exact number of windows as a chess board has squares. We played each other by putting huge cardboard pieces in the windows and moving them from window to window. Since I was in charge of moving the pieces, I got pretty good at chess. However, there must have been a chess genius in that girl’s dorm because they beat us every time.

In the Village, I actually got to play one of the more famous Russian masters who lived there at the time. He slaughtered me but just playing him was an honor. The way you earned a match with that caliber of player was to beat all the skinny, bad-smelling students of his who had the thick glasses and pencil holders in their shirt pockets. So I did. After he trounced me, I asked him, “Would you have been embarrassed if I had beaten you in front of all your students?” He said, “I’ve never heard of you so there was no chance of that happening!” His beating me didn’t help my existential crisis. Now I had to face the fact I wasn’t one of the great chess players in the world.

At that point in my life, the pain I saw on the faces of the drunks I had to step over to get into my apartment and in the subways was starting to creep into my own life. I characterized those few months in New York as “the agony and the agony,” until one morning I had my first original thought.

It was a dark and snowy morning in Queens around six o’clock. I was shaving. I hated to shave and I hated six in the morning and I hated cold weather. Suddenly, I froze with the horror of it all, my electric razor buzzing at my cheek. I don’t like getting up early,I said to myself. I don’t like cold weather and I don’t like New York or my job, or the friends I have made. I haven't even found my soul mate yet for Christsakes! So what am I doing here? I am free to do anything I want. What do I really want?I decided right then and there I wanted to live like Gauguin in Tahiti, having sex with the natives, eating the fruit off the trees and painting all day. That seemed like perpetual bliss, so what was stopping me? Nothing. I put down the razor and called the advertising agency and said I wanted my final check. With it, I headed off to the docks in New York to work my way to Tahiti on a freighter, for that was the only way I could afford to get there.

The dock-workers patiently explained that freighters don’t go to Tahiti from New York and that I must leave from the West Coast. The next thing I knew, I was hitchhiking down the New Jersey turnpike with $40 in my pocket headed roughly in the direction of Tahiti. My life as “playing” was over and my learning how to Play was just beginning.

Click here to Visit Amazon.com and order a copy of Mark's book today! Now only $14.95