Interview excerpted in Issue 56: Gratitude
& Wild Rivers
Rod: Do you remember the George Luste introduction to the book where he
talks about people in our culture who explore the perimeter?
George: Yeah, I think he was right on. Looking back now for
over fifty years, there’s something that I came away with that was extremely
valuable on the trip and to say what it was is a little elusive, but I think
the key thing was the fear got elevated into gratitude. What Art Moffatt did
by taking us away, and doing it for a long enough time that, in the end because
he perished—he froze to death—he took us to the lip of the abyss.
We got to the edge of death there and we were terribly afraid because we were
going to die, but there came a point where the fear dissolved into something
else. Much of it was the gratitude to the Caribou, which we killed. We had run
out of food and we knew we wouldn’t make it across the barrens alive if
the Caribou did not migrate our way. On August 4th, we’d been out a little
over a month and the Caribou did come. There was a tremendous sense of gratitude.
The Inuit hunters, they don’t usually boast and say, “What a great
hunter I am!” They sing the song of how kind the Caribou was to give up
its life for us. So there was this tremendous sense of gratitude—at the
same time, that tremendous fear. And after about two months, the gratitude and
the fear combined so that the tundra began to seem extraordinarily beautiful.
We can go out in nature and look at the sunsets and say, “Ain’t
nature grand,” but the absorption of the beauty was a twenty-four hour
thing. We lost all ambition to return to civilization—civilization seemed
like a dream or a movie we’d seen, and not an especially good movie, you
know. There was a friend, Kama Amanda, who was a Theravadan monk and he’d
gone through a three month mediation and said he had the same feeling. But it
was the only time it happened. It’s what I go back to, but at the same
time I’m scared to go back to it. I get afraid and fear makes me want
to come back to civilization and so forth.
There was a time in my life when I didn’t mind dying.
When we went over the falls and Moffett froze to death—we were all pretty
close to freezing to death, about as close as you can get—and I was passing
in and out of consciousness. One of the things that I asked myself was well,
if I had a choice of dying right there and then or living, but never have gone
on the trip—there was no question that I was very happy to die right there.
Not that I wanted to die, but that I felt I had found what was truly beautiful.
I actually never found before it before or since. I found that to such an extent,
death was not a problem.
Rod: The only time you went back was that ill-fated trip
with George Luste?
George: No, I went back with my first wife and with my second
wife. We took a lot of canoe trips. And I was terrified. I took a trip down
the Nodaway River, which is a very rough river. We discovered that there were
two young men that had attempted to go down the river and had perished on it.
Before that there was a guy in the 1930s that had gone down to escape from an
insane asylum. The Indians found him eating the foam off the rapids. He had
lost everything and was on the verge of starvation; they saved him. And there
was another guy, they found one tennis shoe. He had sort of covered himself
in leaves. He had lost everything in the rapids and he died, too. I was terrified
because I had taken my wife down this trip and I felt responsible for her. It’s
one thing when you make your own peace with death, but when you take somebody
else down and damn near kill them…it took the edge off it.
After that, we took much more safe trips. We were going down
a lot of rivers. We went down the St. Lawrence, which turned out to be a lovely
trip, and down the Iowa river, which was nice. We went down any river that was
around, but I didn’t go back to that terrifying stuff.
But the memory of being over-oared by beauty, gratitude, and
having the fear of death resolve into a desire to be one with that which was
true and beautiful…The trouble with civilization is that, once you have
seen it from the other perspective, it does not seem to be true and beautiful.
In some way, your paintings capture this. You must of at some point experienced
that—the sublime. The picturesque is, you know, humans at peace with nature—a
nice farming picture or something like that. And the beautiful is art. And the
sublime is where the terror is transformed into oneness—they would say
in the eighteenth century, oneness with God.
Rod: Do you have any thoughts on how your life would have
been different had you not done that Art Moffett trip?
George: I managed to fail at my life about as severe as anybody
can fail. I’ve had three broken marriages and two dead kids. I certainly
could have managed to fail just as successfully without the trip, but that experience
has made me calm. I was very confused when my marriages failed and when the
kids were killed. It was difficult to deal with and I have a feeling that the
memory of what is really real, that that was real and that so much else in life
we think is real isn’t real. This is pretty obvious if you’re out
spending your time rushing around making a lot of money or whatever and don’t
have time to reflect on what is real. This monk, Amanda, pointed out that everybody
becomes enlightened before they die, but most people become enlightened only
one second before they die. Enlightenment is an awareness of what is the true
and the beautiful. And riding around in a Mustang will not be true and beautiful…
Rod: Who is this monk? Where did you meet him? Is this
someone you read or a person you knew?
George: A person I knew. Actually his adopted name is Kama
Amanda. His birth name is George Ball—from Winnipeg. As a child he’d
been in an iron cell for a long time. He became a dharma kid and went over to
India and entered a Theravadan monastery down in Ceylon. Buddha meditated for
forty-nine days before becoming enlightened and then he meditated for another
forty-nine days. So he meditated for ninety-eight days, approximately three
months. The Theravadan emulate the Buddha do the full ninety-eight days. He
was in a cell for those ninety-eight days and they would pass a bowl of soup
to him occasionally, but not on a regular basis. It’s interesting that
the technique of the Theravadan monks to lead someone to enlightenment is very
similar to the techniques the CIA has adopted to break down prisoners in Iraq,
which is sensory deprivation, disorientation. They become very dependent upon
their keeper. To a certain extent I guess, Kama became very dependent on these
other monks. The monks would call him in once every three or four weeks or something
and chat with him just to make sure he hadn’t gone totally bonkers; they
wanted to know where he was on the path. And, of course, he did become enlightened.
But the process involved essentially dying to this world. The brain clears out.
When you meditate you’re supposed to let things pass through.
Over a three month period of time, your family disappears, the relationship
disappears. And when you finally clear everything out, you fall into the abyss.
During the first fall, you become very afraid of physical death because you
get disoriented and realize you’re going to die and you’re never
going to get out of the cell. You’re very much aware of your dying. And
the second fear comes a couple of weeks later, which is the fear of anonymity
because you’re not talking to anybody, you’re not meeting anybody,
and the memories are like a dream or a movie you’ve seen once. The final
fear is the fear that God doesn’t exist, and therefore you don’t
have a soul. The third fall into the abyss literally feels like falling into
a black hole of nothingness where not even your soul exists because God doesn’t
exist either. At that point, when you are totally dead psychologically, then,
if you’re lucky, there is this tremendous flash of light, very bright
light, and a great feeling of warmth. Literally, the enlightenment is this flash
of brilliant light, and then ironically you’re no longer alone. What appears
to you at this point is the heavenly host, the angels, and they start singing
to you, and behind the angels is this glorious light, which you relate to as
if it were God. You feel no longer alone, no longer cold, no longer dark, no
longer dead, and you get this tremendous sense of gratitude towards what’s
out there, whatever it is.
After he left the cell, and after we’d gotten back from
our trip, there was this feeling of gratitude to everyone. When a Bodhisattva
walks down the street, a flower just seems so incredibly beautiful and anybody
that comes up to a Bodhisattva, they’re so glad for the company that they’re
just overjoyed. People begin to see the Bodhisattva as a savior because the
Bodhisattva can only see the good and the true and the beautiful in the people,
and there is always, of course, a bit of an angel in everybody as well as a
bit of the devil, and if you’re in the company of one who only sees the
angel in you, it’s very peaceful, very pleasant. People are incredibly
attracted to an enlightened Bodhisattva because the person is so at peace and
is so grateful for everything.
Initially Bodhisattvas see themselves as empty vessels through
which the love of God flows. When they love somebody, it is not them who is
loving them, it is God who is loving them. And they know that as long as they
remain empty, that love will flow. This love of God that you felt at the moment
of enlightenment keeps pouring through you to other people who are suffering,
and so it appears that you are an extremely compassionate and loving person,
but what you know is that it’s really God’s love that’s passing
through and it has nothing to do with you because you’ve been emptied
of yourself. But pretty soon if you’re out in society and the people gather
around and say, “Oh, you’re a Bodhisattva, you’re an enlightened
one,” then they begin to identify that love and that compassion with you
as a person and you begin to forget that really it’s not you that’s
doing the loving, it’s really God and that you have to keep this vessel
empty in order for God’s love to flow. After a while enough people come
around and elevate you until you have sort of some divine status. You begin
to think, oh yes I really am pretty good…you start to get your identity
back, and you think you’re the god that’s loving these people rather
than an empty vessel. So that’s the second step.
The third one is that you see that the world is treating all
these miserable people that are suffering unfairly, and then you go to the prophet
stage where you start ranting against civilization, which is so cruel to the
poor. The sense of loving everything disappears and you begin to see the devil
at work in people and start condemning them and then you essentially fall back
into the mud and get into all the causes to save the world and see the world
as evil. Which of course it is, but the Theravadan monks retire back to the
monastery and go into another meditation.
Kama Amanda, he went into a final meditation, which is a meditation
of death where you simply withdraw completely. The Bodhisattva, the enlightened
one, should walk out to bring peace to the world, or withdraw. The Theravadans,
they withdraw because a Bodhisattva is very dangerous. To a certain extent,
Hitler was a Bodhisattva. He was a fallen angel. He had come so close to dying
in the First World War that he had become in some ways enlightened, but then
he saw the injustices afterwards and he started to preach. And what do you end
up with? You end up with a whole nation following this person who had been enlightened
and, through the Second World War, sixty-three million people perish. You also
hear how the Jonestown Massacre—I don’t know if you remember that—where
one of these Bodhisattvas founded this colony and had this ideal state and ended
up making them all commit suicide. A Bodhisattva is a very dangerous person,
though not dangerous when they first come out of enlightenment, when they begin
to think that they themselves now are God and the saviors of the world, that’s
when they become very dangerous. So that’s why they end up locked up in
monasteries so that they don’t fall back into this devil mode. A fallen
Bodhisattva is very dangerous.
Rod: Your thinking along these lines evolved from meeting
this monk?
George: No, they came from the experience of being out in the
Arctic for a hundred days. We were emulating the Buddha in a sense. The Buddha
sat under the fig tree and meditated and he emptied himself for a hundred days
and went through this experience. Well we went through the very same experience
more or less accidentally, only we did it by physically removing ourselves.
Pilgrimages are part of the enlightenment process. You have a destination, which
is a physical and a spiritual destination. If you’re walking to a shrine
of a Saint, what you’re trying to do is to see the world from a saintly
perspective, or see the world from the perspective of Jesus when Jesus is hung
on the cross. So when Jesus is being crucified, he’s being emptied. You
can’t really empty yourself more than letting yourself be crucified. But
you can also empty yourself by going on a pilgrimage and if you walk for more
than forty days or so you will be emptied.
The idea is to reach that spiritual destination before you
reach the physical destination. The physical destination ceases to be important
after a while, but you need it to start off, to focus your attention on the
Saint. After the Turks closed down the holy land, people went on pilgrimages
within Europe—Santiago de Compestelo and St. James became very popular.
But they also just made mazes in the cathedrals and you could go on a walking
meditation as if you were going on a pilgrimage. These pilgrimages, which almost
all religions have, are a way of emptying yourself of attachment and are very
curative. So Art was taking us on a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a pilgrimage
to a saint, it was a pilgrimage back into the longest uninhabited bit of nature
in North America—the barren grounds of central sub-Arctic Canada.
Rod: Your experience on that trip changed your life because
you encountered this kind of, for want of a better word, enlightenment, because
you came so close to death, and so you’ve gone through your adult life
with a different perception of reality than you would have had had you not experienced
that?
George: Well, people can get emptied accidentally in a lot
of ways. Soldiers often get emptied in battlefield situations. People that go
through deathly diseases, who get cancer and come very close to death, often
go through the same thing. Now I don’t know if your cancer did it, or
your canoeing experience, but you seem to have gone through a similar process.
Rod: Yeah maybe, I don’t think I’ve ever been
through anything as intense as you have on my canoe trip. Although obviously
the darkest days of my experience with cancer were pretty dark.
George: You were pretty empty I imagine at that point.
Rod: When I first asked you what impact that trip had on
your life, you started by talking about how in some ways your life was a failure
and I didn’t really get the connection between that trip and why you look
on aspects of your life as a failure, particularly what it had to do with your
divorces and then you mentioned your children dying.
George: Well, at this point—I’m seventy-four—I
look back and I see three failed marriages and two dead kids and my father committing
suicide and the death of Moffett. There were a lot of bodies strewn along the
way, and I caused a lot of suffering with my wives that I didn’t intend
to do. So in that sense I objectively think I’ve failed, but at the same
time, to be honest, it just was. My kids died; at the time, it was very painful,
but that’s just the way the world is. It’s full of death and sadness
and broken up marriages and unfortunate stuff. So actually I’m more at
peace with it than perhaps I’m willing to admit.
Rod: So how did you meet Kama Amanda?
George: Well, I had a friend, he was student of mine, Patty
Dorin, and he became an Anglican priest. He was on a spiritual quest all his
life and he ran into Kama in Winnipeg on a meditation. Winnipeg was going through
a lot of renovations and there were these old houses that were very beautiful,
or had been very beautiful, with gorgeous wooden floors and gardens out back.
They were about to be torn and so Kama would take his people in there and they
would polish old floors, Kama restored the garden into something that was beautiful,
and they’d clear out all the furniture. He was also a musician—played
the sitar. He’d create an absolutely beautiful environment and then take
these people into this three months mediation. And Patty went through this kind
of and took me there when we were passing through. Kama was about to start one
of these meditations.
Rod: You didn’t do the meditation?
George: No, but I talked to him back in Dunbeath and I described
the three fears that we had gone through: fear of physically dying, fear of
anonymity, fear that there’s no God and you have no soul, total emptiness.
He said that those are exactly the stages that the Theravadan monks go through
and that’s when he said that everybody becomes enlightened before they
die. There’s a book called Life at Death, which goes through
this. People that have near-death experiences and then don’t die for whatever
reason, this flash of light, the warmth, and the angels singing are very common.
Doesn’t happen to everybody, but maybe they didn’t get close enough
to death.
Rod: The question is, is it because of the shortage of
oxygen to the brain or some similar thing? The brain’s starting to shut
down and this is how it’s programmed to react to that. Or could it be
the actual presence of God entering your life at the last moments of life. It’s
unclear what exactly is going on.
George: Well, I think chemically there is a shot of opium—your
brain kicks it in…so it may be a chemical thing, but what is definitely
real is the feeling. You go from being very cold, very dark, very alone, very
empty into being very full. And what also is very real is this willingness to
be in an empty state and to let the love of God flow through, and that love,
which is not coming from yourself and you know it. And you’ll also know
it will continue to flow provided you don’t stop it and say, “I
want the love to flow into me, but I don’t want it to flow out to somebody
else.” As soon as you stop it and want God to love you, then the feeling
goes away. You can’t tell God, “Love me.” It doesn’t
work. But you can empty yourself.
Rod: So you met this monk twice and you’ve read things
that he’s written? Or you kept in touch with someone who’s kept
in touch with him?
George: No, I met him several times. He hasn’t written
anything that I know of.
Rod: He’d be passing through Toronto or something?
George: Passing through Hamilton, Dunbeath, he’d stay
with Patty Dorin when he was in town, and Patty would do some meditations with
him and I would come and so we would chat. He and I recognized we’d gone
through the same experience at some point, and so we had something to chat about.
It’s like when you’ve lost your kids, when your kids are killed,
the only people really who seem to know how you feel are people who’ve
also lost their kids. And it’s instantaneous and you don’t need
to say anything. Death is different. I mean I lost my father—that made
me smarten up. I was getting thrown out of Harvard at the time. I smartened
up and started to work very hard. But that was very different. When the kids
died…it pulls the rug right out from you. It’s very hard to do anything
because you start to say, “If only I had done this, if only I had done
that.” So other people who have lost their kids, I know exactly what they’re
going through. It takes about five years to go through it. So it’s the
same thing—enlightenment is a form of death, too. If you meet somebody
else who has gone through that death experience, the emptying experience, you
know exactly how they feel. You don’t need to say very much.
Rod: Is Kama Amanda still alive?
George: No, he died. He went on his final meditation.
Rod: He went on a meditation with the deliberate purpose
of dying?
George: No, he had cancer and so he went on his final meditation.
He’d gone on a three-year meditation before that, but his final withdrawal
was the final passage of emptying yourself and moving over. He died very well—a
very peaceful death.
Rod: The trip of course was a very profound experience
in your life and a major reason for that was walking this edge between death
and enlightenment. And you do seem to feel that the path that you’ve taken
in life and the things that have happened to you have in some way been related,
or inspired by, or somehow related to this experience that you had in your twenties.
You feel your life has taken a different course as a result of that trip with
Art Moffatt, but you’re not exactly sure if you can pinpoint it.
George: Well, I think it gave me a place to fall back to because
much of this world…well, it ceased to be real. When this world has collapsed,
which it’s done periodically, I have a feeling that there is another world,
another place of peace. I have that memory and so when some very terrible things
happen —I can’t think of anything worse than having your children
die—there is still the memory of a reality that transcends the death of
a particular individual, or even your own children, that is very real for me.
I do feel very much at peace and I think I can trace it back to that time.
