It is dark. It is cold. There is fear.
But fear is only a hindrance. It is only drifting through.
The menace of the wind. Wind rattling the dry scrub, the vibrating branches now the sound and form of the wind in the darkness. Wind rushing in the ears. The invisible, inescapable force of it rushing at this body. The cold slicing at it.
All that can be harmed is that which is not...
Fingers numb, feet numb, entire body clenched with cold.
There is no identity in these sensations. There is no identity in this body. The only thing truly you, the only thing purely you, is...
This body falls away. That which is concentrating falls away.
If that which is concentrating concentrates continuously …
But the small, hard shape that he pressed into this hand. The pill now in the palm of this hand.
If that which is concentrating concentrates continuously …
Why, then, a pill? That which is concentrating has no need for a pill.
Wind rattling the dry scrub.
And yet I’m afraid to throw it away, to toss it away into the wind and the cold sand. He brought me here. He pressed it into this hand.
The wind is the only sound. It rises up in sheets against this body. The dark shrubs quiver.
*
Everything I did those days.
The twelve ounces of room-temperature bottled water and lemon juice each morning. The thirty minutes of facial cleansing and moisturizing. The traffic so slow I could feel myself aging. The studio where I contorted my limbs, repeated the same motions, over and over. The revival shampoo for color-treated hair, the revival conditioner for twice as long, the taming and setting gel, the application of the full-body exfoliant, the application of the fully-body rejuvenating wash, the full-body moisturizer, the tweezing of the brows. The six ounces of organic fat-free yogurt and one ounce of organic raw almonds. The repetition of the lines. The hour in traffic on the way to the set where I said the lines I'd been given, where I followed directions.
Everything back then just a means to an end. A means to the part that would change everything.
*
I passed the same stores, the same kind of listless shoppers. The muzak had always made it seem like I was entering a TV show I’d already seen. That time, though, I walked toward the empty kiosk with almost a sense of purpose.
He wasn't there. He wasn't in front of the nearby juice shop or sunglasses kiosk or athleisure store. I waited. A homeless-looking woman passed, blanket draped over her shoulders, winter hat on her head despite the mild temperature, her entire body weighed down by her heavy bags. One motorized chair, then another, trundled by, their operators buckled into their seats. But he wasn't there.
I was disappointed, I realized. Why, I couldn't say. Above the length of the promenade, a netting I had never noticed extended in straight lines. It took me a minute to realize they were strands of decorative lights.
*
Then, the very next day, there he was.
My chest rose when I saw him. The faded coverall, the shorn head, face upturned, gaze fixed far beyond. He wasn't seeing what I was seeing, wasn't hearing what I was hearing. Wasn't even aware of his own body. What I felt, I realized then, was longing. Not for him. But for what he could do.
So I stayed. I stilled my own body, tried to tune out the muzak. I stood there longer than I had the other times. It was as if by watching him I might come to understand how to do what he did. How to be as he was.
I was still there when he blinked. One slow blink, then another, as if he were adjusting to a different consciousness, to the body he found himself in, the paving stones beneath him, the netting above. Another slow blink. And here his gaze seemed to alight on me. I felt suddenly exposed. As if he knew just how long I’d been watching. But his attention flickered away. I watched him, as before, gather his body, regain his balance, and then, loose limbed, begin to walk. Toward me.
Even when he was right in front of me, the expression on his face barely changed. Calm, steady, unperturbed. It was as if we occupied two different spaces, or phases, and the noise of mine didn’t apply to his. There was something radiant about him. As he looked at me, the light from his eyes seemed to fill even the creases of his face. I pushed my sunglasses from my own eyes.
I found myself explaining to him, foolishly, how I had tried meditation before, how it never took, how I could never feel any lasting effect, not on my mind or my body.
“They’re the problem, aren’t they?” His gaze seemed never to leave my eyes. “The body, the mind.”
I felt myself nodding. It was true.
He spoke slowly, paused significantly, as if he understood something about time, about thought, that I didn’t.
Then he asked me a question.
"What is you? What is truly you?"
He waited for me to answer.
But he must have known I didn’t know.
I was forty. The sitcom pilot I’d only just shot had been canceled. I was being written off the daytime show I barely appeared on. Still I learned my lines, still I delivered them according to the direction I was given. The hours spent tightening, tightening, as a smiling instructor hollered out commands. The botox, that strange disconnect it created between impulse and appearance. The hard but shapely breasts that never felt like mine. The hours spent in a salon chair. The hours spent repeating lines. Always one audition away from the part that would change everything. I grew tired at the thought of keeping this up until old age, hardening into one of those burnished statuettes that those who lasted the longest came to resemble, their faces perfect masks, their locks eternally lustrous.
Nothing about myself, in truth, felt truly me.
“What’s truly you” – his words hung in the air, waiting to be filled – “isn’t anything you’re aware of right now.”
I wanted him to say more. He was looking into my eyes, unblinking.
I had to look down for a moment.
He was waiting for me when I looked up again. His eyes letting light into his whole gaunt face.
“I can see it in you,” he said.
It seemed important that I not look away.
“A glimmer.”
It did feel as if he could see something in me. Not past me, or through me, or over me, but into something that was actually me. I had no idea what that was. But he did.
“A glimmer of pure spirit,” he said. He seemed almost transfixed by it.
“But it’s trapped. It’s trapped inside all this.” A gesture toward me. “These sensations, these thoughts, these emotions, these memories. These doubts.” Then he gestured widely, taking in everything along the promenade. The glassed-in store fronts, the muzak, the netting overhead. “All of this.”
He could see I was trapped. And maybe that was clear enough to anybody. But what really mattered was that he saw me. The glimmer. The hesti.
*
The wind slicing through the coverall that clothes the body.
I’ve never been so painfully aware of the body.
The body is a prison. It keeps that which is concentrating from concentrating on hesti.
And yet, somehow, I can’t let it go.
The body is a prison. It keeps…
Is that why he gave me the pill?
Did he not, finally, believe I could?
*
But the first time, in the park –
He'd walked me away from the mall, past the muzak, past the glassy displays, walked me till we reached the green inlet of a park. We sat cross-legged in the stubbly grass and looked toward the sky. Above the fan of tropical greenery, above the glassy facade of an office building, above the windy heights of the spindly palms, until there was only a scrim of blue.
"Just look at the sky." His voice low, calm. "Look at the light of it ... the lightness beyond the light ..."
It had felt natural to follow him. He'd brought me to this quieter place so that he could show me how to do what he did. That was what I’d realized I wanted. He could help me.
"The lightness beyond the light..." Calm, unhurried. "And feel, within you, the vibration, the clarity ... of that glimmer."
I stared at the sky, trying to see only light. The rush of a fountain became the rush of the traffic, which was maybe the rush of the wind.
"That glimmer ... that which is constant ... pure ... clarifying … within you. That glimmer that is you."
I tried to see the lightness beyond the light. If I unfocused my gaze, the light of the sky became blurred.
Continuous ... ever present ... a vibration ... a glimmering behind your eyes. That glimmer that is you. Always there. Constant, pure, clarifying.
He spoke slowly, paused from thought to thought, word to word, so that sometimes it seemed as if time was slowing as well, that every word he spoke was one, continuing, expanding, ever-present thought.
A glimmer, he would say. Glimmer … immer … mer … mer.
After a while, it came to seem as if that was his name for me, this echo of the glimmer he saw in me.
“The more you concentrate on it,” he said, “the easier it is to concentrate, the lighter you are.”
Now he turned to me. And because his eyes were so full of light, so clear themselves, it was as if I could feel that light within me. That which is clarifying, he said, that which is lightening.
Lightening, he said. That was what we were doing.
*
Light, not heavy. Light, no longer weighed down by these sensations, this body.
Fingers numb, feet numb, entire body clenched with cold.
But remember:
The Lewksmn has said to us … he has said: If you wish to emerge from the prison of this world, if you wish to emerge as pure spirit, if you wish to merge with the Plenos, the plane of pure spirit, you must concentrate on hesti, the pure spirit, the pure spirit that I am, the pure spirit that you are, the Plenos that we are. Then you will become light.
*
I didn’t know anything about the Lewksmn back then.
I only knew that I wanted to feel that way again, feel that sense of the glimmer Wyde saw in me, a glimmer that was somehow a glimmer beyond all else. Wyde, he'd said I could call him, the long I sound stretched wide in the middle, like the sky. He was a guide, he said.
During that first lightening, I hadn't been able, not really, to see anything myself. The rest of the world hadn't, as I'd hoped, disappeared as I'd tried to focus on the lightness beyond the light. The sky was still just the sky. I could still hear the traffic. But I'd also heard his voice, the slow cadence of it that was entirely focused on me, that saw something in me, a glimmer of something, something that no one else saw, that would not expire.
On the floor of my apartment, on the grass of that same park, on the sand of the beach, I looked at the sky and I tried to concentrate, to clarify, to lighten. I straightened my posture, I breathed deeply, I tried to see the lightness beyond the light of the sky. I tried to feel, within myself, the vibration and the clarity of the glimmer he could see in me.
But I found that I couldn’t get there on my own. The sky was ordinary, almost forgotten behind the tiresome clamor in my head, the heaviness of my body.
It was as if I'd had a marvelous trip, the glow of it still at the edges of my eyes, but I lacked the substance that had sent me there in the first place.
*
The body now just stamping in place, in the cold, in the wind. Lifting the feet, the knees, pumping the arms. Something makes the body move in place, moving it but moving nowhere. It doesn’t know where to go. I don’t know where to go.
The night stretches out.
I want to return.
He was a guide, he said.
Will he guide me again?
The body now just stamping in place.
But if the sky, when the sky, becomes light enough to see by, then I can, then I will, find my way back to him.
I’ve misunderstood something. About the pill. He’ll make it clear. I’ve misunderstood, but he's a guide.
He can guide me again, and then I will be able to become light.
*
I found my way back to him.
Still early summer then.
To get there, that time, I drove to Griffith Park, into its dry canyons. The rest of the way on foot, a short ways up a fire road. He was there when I arrived, the still center of twenty or thirty people, all of them still finding places for themselves. The dusty, scrubby ground. He sat as I'd first seen him at the mall, cross-legged, hands in his lap, face upturned, eyes fixed.
He was a guide, he’d said.
This was a group lightening.
I watched the other people arranging themselves, settling on a spot and sitting as he did. Everyone sat directly on the dusty ground, as he did. This absence of special equipment, of yoga mats in pastel colors with borrowed Sanskrit names, seemed right. What they were doing was different.
I settled myself on the ground as well. The sky on the verge of sunrise, the air still cool. The traffic below was faint, just a dull white noise. The bright squeaks of a few birds. After some minutes had passed, it struck me that there were no human voices. No one was speaking. No one was chatting with the person beside them, no one was greeting anyone else. It was like the hush of anticipation you can feel in an audience between movements of a musical composition.
I waited with everyone else, trying to concentrate on the lightness beyond the light that was gradually coloring the sky. We were not facing the view of the city below, still glittering in the half darkness. Nor did we face the direction of the sunrise. As when Wyde had sat me down in the park, we were slightly out of alignment with the architecture of the location. What this meant, I didn't know. It seemed important, though.
The Lewksmn emerged…
Wyde’s voice itself emerged from the hush, slow and deliberate as I'd known it, rising from where he sat on the ground, and then I was staring with real purpose at the sky again, with him, like that day in the park.
“The Lewksmn emerged from the prison of the body, from the man imprisoning him. And in doing so, the Lewksmn emerged from everything else in this entrapping world.”
He hadn't, before then, spoken of the Lewksmn to me. But what I heard him say now made sense. It was all of a piece with what he had said before, about how I was trapped, about how what was truly me was trapped. That glimmer.
“The Lewksmn emerged from this prison as hesti, pure spirit, merging with the Plenos, the plane of pure spirit.
“In doing so, he showed us the way.
“He showed us – that which is hesti, that which is pure, that which is clear and clarifying within this prison – the way.
“He has said to us … he has said:
“If you wish to emerge from your prison, if you wish to emerge as pure spirit, if you wish to merge with the Plenos, you must concentrate on hesti, the pure spirit, the pure spirit that I am, the pure spirit that you are, the Plenos that we are.
“You must learn to always focus on this, without letting up. And thus you will succeed in emerging from this prison, in merging with the Plenos."
The Lewksmn, hesti, the Plenos. These slightly foreign words, the sound of them not quite like a word in English, and yet not unlike it either. Almost as if I’d heard them before and was just being reminded.
“When lightening, there is a distinction made between hesti, that which is pure, and the hindrances that obscure it, the entrapments of this worldly being that imprisons it. … Concentrating on the hesti within … lightening, purifying, clarifying, … we – hesti – come closer to the Plenos, the purely spiritual plane.”
Hesti, I was trying to understand … was what he could see in me. It was me. And so it felt right, even if the idea kept half-slipping away.
“Being this pure, clear, clarifying quality. … Learning how to be this pure, clear, clarifying quality without entrapping it in the prison that is the mind, that is the body, that is this entrapping world. … Pure, clear, clarifying. … Glimmering."
There was something that happened when he spoke, when he slowly intoned those words, almost like an incantation, as I stared at the sky and tried not to see it as the sky.
I was trapped and he could free me. It seemed so clear.
My back had begun to ache and the ground was hard, but this seemed incidental. These were hindrances, entrapments. What was happening was entirely different from the times I had sat on a yoga mat and tried to focus on my breath for reasons that always remained murky to me, as if I were missing something that would never arrive. But the purpose of this, now, as Wyde spoke and I stared at the sky until it was no longer sky, was clear.
I was trapped and he could free me.
Pure, clear, clarifying. Free.
The sky was now full of light. The city below was drained of the artificial glitter that had been visible when we’d begun. There was motion around me, the movement of bodies. People were getting up. I found myself wanting to look away, to look above them.
He was standing now, very simply, arms at his sides. As if he had no use for them. There was no need to speak, he reminded us. No need to shake hands or hug or exchange information. We came here not to further entrench ourselves in this entrapping world, but to lighten, to slough off its hindrances.
*
Afterward, back in my apartment, I tried again to summon what I’d felt under his guidance, staring at the sky. I tried to focus on the glimmer within me, the hesti. I tried to feel its vibration ... its glimmer ... its purity. I tried to lighten.
But my thoughts inevitably interfered, the branching tangle of them, as did my body, the ache in my back, the hard floor on my haunches, the gurgle of my stomach.
It seemed impossible to detect any glimmer, nothing like he’d seen in me. I could only feel how trapped I was.
*
An orange line seeping across the flat horizon.
The body clenched with cold. The mouth dry.
An orange line seeping across the flat horizon. That is east.
That is east.
Rubbing the hands together, feeling nothing but clenched cold.
The line a light that makes the low clouds visible, setting them aglow, exposing the dark stick figures of the scrub.
That is east.
Now I know which way is east, west, north, and south.
In what direction was he walking when we started out from the ruins last night? The sun was setting, but we weren't walking into it. It was sinking to our left. I remember the glare when I turned to see him. We were walking north. We always move north. As he did, when he received his lightness.
But now I will walk south. He walked me here and then he walked back to the ruins. The ruins can't be far away.
South. A flat expanse of scrub and sand now visible, as if suddenly cleared, aglow in a light that hasn't reached me yet. I begin walking.
*
Sometimes it was off a fire road in Griffith Park, sometimes farther north, just a ways into Angeles Forest. But always on the same kind of dusty, scrubby earth, where it seemed as if the wind had already blown away most signs of life. As if some of the hindrances of this world, this entrapping world that Wyde spoke of, had been stripped away.
And so I found my way to another guided lightening.
Then another.
And another.
Three times a week, always before dawn.
It wasn't like going to church. The bland Presbyterian building my mother had driven us to, her station wagon on a Sunday morning smelling of stale coffee, the rows of pews as dismal as a dentist's waiting room.
It wasn't like yoga. A thin veneer of something like spirituality, an emphasis on deep breathing, namaste marking the beginning and end of a forty-five-minute class. That was no different, in the end, from the treadmill or the stair climber or the stationary bicycle.
To get to a guided lightening, I would drive out of my way, first one morning, then another, and another, into the canyons, into the chaparral.
I was written off the daytime show. Mine was not a character they saw having any future in that world, the show runner explained.
I learned different lines and bared my shoulders and my arms and my legs and recited the lines in small, close rooms, and did it again, and again. It just wasn’t the right fit, the casting director would explain. They were looking for someone who was a better fit.
And I would force myself to the next barre class, the next spin class, would exfoliate and cleanse and moisturize. Would begin to learn new lines. The right part would appear. It was just a matter of time.
Then I would wake early again, before dawn.
*
I walk.
The sun will warm the sky, warm the sand, warm the body. I will find my way back to him.
I will walk until I see the ruins, until I see him.
The wind pushes the body forward, insistent now.
The day stretches out. Sand and sky and wind.
*
He had had a vision.
“I was a businessman, an entrepreneur, a real wheeler dealer,” he would say. He said it as if with sympathy for someone who was not present. “I was just one of the many who meditate for success – ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the evening, in a big sound-proof corporate meditation room – for improved focus and calm under fire. That was all it was for.”
“I made the big deals,” he said. “My quarterly earnings were high, my blood pressure admirably low.”
Looking out at all of us. At me.
“And I would’ve gone on like that, gone on doing my morning ten in the corporate meditation room and thinking nothing else of it.”
But for the vision.
Even in the world of brain scans and airport security and fitness trackers, where everything is reducible to its component parts, he had had a vision.
And when he spoke of it, I believed him. The light of his eyes, the slow, certain, mesmeric way he had of speaking. Like he was talking just to me. I believed him.
Lightness was what he actually called it. The Lightness that came to me. “Vision” hardly described what had happened. It had involved none of his habitual senses, none of the senses of this world.
He was overcome when he talked about it. “I can only say that I knew a light so great and a voice so commanding that it’s not accurate to say that I saw or heard them, or that they were light or sound.”
“It was a lightness that suffused me. That’s the only way I have of describing it to you.”
We were still, and listened.
“And that lightness was all I knew, all I was. I felt nothing else, heard nothing else, saw nothing else. I was empty of thought. That lightness was all I knew and all I was.”
It was he, and he was it.
How long it had lasted, he had no idea. He’d had no sense of time, or space, or anything. Nothing but lightness.
“But as that lightness, that pure clarity, began to fade … my first recollection of this world, this world again – was a hard surface.”
As if he were feeling it all over again.
“I was lying on the hard floor of the corporate meditation room.”
His sight took longer to return, and he lay there against that hard floor for – how long – he didn't know.
“What I saw first – when I finally could see – was a flat surface.”
As if he were seeing it all over again.
“I was looking up at the ceiling of the corporate meditation room. “I felt the hard floor and saw the hard, flat ceiling.”
Then he saw the four walls, four gray walls. He saw all of the hard, flat surfaces closing in on him, from every side.
Like a prison cell, he said.
”I realized I was in a prison, and I had to escape.“
He couldn’t resume his normal life of investor meetings and review meetings and sales meetings and board meetings and earnings calls and emails and lunch meetings and dinner meetings and making the sell, over and over.
“I left the building and began to walk.”
As if in a trance – and yet, with greater clarity than he'd ever felt – “I left the corporate meditation room, I left the building’s glass walls and steel beams, I bypassed the narrow box of the elevator and, stumbling, stumbling, I moved down flights and flights and flights of stairs.” (Twenty-eight in all, he said.) “And I began to walk.”
Everytime he told this story, it was as if I could feel his momentum, was on the verge of walking with him.
He didn’t know in what direction he was walking, just that he was walking toward something.
“It was morning,” he told us. “The horizon was tinged with light. After a while, it occurred to me that I was walking north. The sky, as I walked, was gradually suffused with light. It was not the lightness I'd known – not at all.” His eyes far away as he remembered. “And yet it reminded me of what I had known.”
He walked the whole day. Through the streets, through the streetlights, through the blown-out palms, through the glass facades of the tall buildings, through the clutter of strip malls and drive-throughs and gas stations, through the traffic he barely saw.
“I walked until I came to the roots and shadows of a forest, and the road narrowed and turned to dirt and became a path.”
What it must have been like to find that path. To find a path.
“And I kept walking. The shadows deepening, the road climbing, the night falling. I kept walking. I felt neither fatigue nor thirst nor hunger nor any need to relieve myself. Only the need to keep walking.”
Only when he realized that there was nothing but dirt and scrub for miles and miles, on every side of him, the same dirt and scrub that was beneath his feet – that he had emerged from the forest – “Only then did I know that this was where I needed to be.”
Then he collapsed, he said. “My legs were no longer of use to me.”
And as he sat in the dirt, the endless, dusty plain running into a horizon that was like a mirage, his gaze lifted toward the sky, which was bright and quavering in the heat.
“After a while, as I gazed at the sky, it was no longer the sky but a light – a lightness.” His voice got quiet. “A lightness that began to lift me.”
Then he recalled what he had known in those long moments in the meditation room, the lightness that had come to him. And as he did, he realized who it was that had made it known to him.
*
“The Lewksmn went out into the desert,” Wyde told us. “He went out into the desert to lighten. And there, the essence of the Plenos trapped within the body was lightened from its prison.”
I remember the silence of those early mornings when he would tell the story. To us, to me.
The ground bare.
His eyes, full of lightness.
“It happened there, in the desert.” Wyde would look north when he said this. “There, in the desert, the essence became light.”
Lewksmn meant light, he would say, very softly. Lightness.
The Lewksmn, the essence of the Plenos, had sloughed off the flesh and all other hindrances of this world. The Lewksmn had merged once more with the whole of the Plenos.
“And the body that was the Lewksmn’s prison – well, they found it, slumped over, empty of the essence of the Plenos it had once imprisoned.”
“But they didn’t know that,” Wyde would remind us. “The people who found the body had no idea what it meant.”
As the rest of the world knew him, the Lewksmn was just a man.
“The man, the body that trapped him – just as our bodies trap us – was born in a hospital in the Valley, raised in a suburb, raised – just as I was, just as you were – to embrace every hindrance, to cling to the body.”
The stillness, now, of the bodies gathered before him. Prisons we might yet escape.
“For twenty-eight years, the Lewksman, the essence of the Plenos, was trapped in that body. That prison.”
I would think of all the decades I’d been trapped. Imprisoned. The body I still wore, preserved, clung to.
“But the Lewksmn knew what he truly was. The essence of the Plenos. Come down to show us the way back. And the Lewksman taught, to those who would hear him, what was true.”
Few, though, understood the most essential thing the Lewksman had taught.
But out there in the desert, surrounded by wind and sky and only dust beneath the limbs that had carried him there, Wyde realized the truth about the man who had died in the desert. He realized the significance of what he had been made to know and of what he now knew.
Wyde would tremble at the thought. “The Lewksman has shown us the way.”
A lightness filling the sky.
“Because all of us, each one of us” – Wyde looked out at us there before him – “is a glimmer of the Plenos, a fallen fragment trapped in a body.”
He could see it. He could see us.
“Few people understood what the slumped-over body in the desert meant, what it meant for us, what it means for us – for those of us who have the glimmer.”
But Wyde knew. And he knew what had been asked of him.
“I was now a guide, a wyde.” A truth that felt like a revelation, every time. “I am a wyde. I was called to guide other trapped glimmers of the Plenos back to that purely spiritual plane.”
Like you, he said to me, his eyes so full of light, of lightness, that I felt he could see into me, that he could see what truly was me.
How he would tremble when he said it then. The Lewksman has shown us the way.
*
I walk. The sand before me glowing brown, now pale orange, now glinting white.
*
The Lewksman has shown us…
The kid from the Valley.
He was easy to mock. A skinny kid in his twenties. The earnest soul patch, the man bun, the shirts with their ripped-out collars. Some new kind of meditation he offered. A way to achieve spiritual fullness.
This was years before.
Lightweight, we called him. His twig legs in those oversized cargo shorts. Spiritualism Lite, we called him. Lightman was his last name, I think. That was what his followers called him. Lightman. The Lightman.
He did have followers. I’d hear their impromptu testaments now and then.
On set, an actress with a walk-on part that required a leather corset, avowing that TS had given her meditation practice spiritual fullness.
TS, people called it. Transcendent Spirit.
After spin class, in the air-conditioned locker room, two women talking over each other to insist how their lives had been infused with spiritual fullness.
Lightweight was supposed to be the source of their wisdom. Spiritual fullness. Like a Cracker Barrel buffet for the soul.
TS wasn't big, not like TL. Transcendent Life was practically an institution. It’d been around for decades. A plush center in Santa Monica, celebrity endorsements, funding for fMRI and EEG studies to scientifically prove its benefits. Its trademarked golden lotus flower in the trendier parts of cities. Everybody, at some point, seemed to have at least tried TL. Personal trainers and make-up artists, directors and producers, baristas and bartenders, down-on-their-luck actors and shiny celebrities. All of them putting in their ten minutes of meditation twice a day and reaping the rewards: better health, improved self-confidence, and personal success. I knew plenty of people who swore by TL.
But the Lightweight, the Lightman, the kid from Canoga Park – he declared TL spiritually empty. He'd done some kind of soul searching. Maybe in the mountains, maybe in the desert. No one quite knew where.
And he began to teach what he said was the true form of Transcendent Life. Transcendent Spirit was what he called it.
“Through it, you can achieve, like, a state of spiritual fullness that then … infuses your whole life.” An actor who was waiting on set, wrapped in the bandages of a mummy.
The stylist, while I sat with strips of tinfoil in my hair, trying to convince another stylist that there was so much more to meditation than ten minutes twice a day for better health, improved confidence, and personal success, and had he ever experienced a state of spiritual fullness?
And the other stylist, who credited TL with his current success and had no interest in a change in formula, kept shaking his head and retracting his lips into his mouth as if he couldn't even begin to respond.
It all seemed laughable at the time – the TS people trying to convince the TL people that their way, this new way, was the real thing, and the TL people clinging to the surefire method they’d paid a lot of money for.
But enough people seemed to be into TS, to find something in what this self-anointed guru from Canoga Park offered. Or at least those who did were vocal about it. I listened to them with half an ear, the way you listen to people who are into crystals or hypnotherapy.
So I heard about it when the kid died. Lightweight. Lightman.
Out there in the Mojave, just north of Angeles Forest.
As he was meditating, an aneurysm ruptured in his brain. His body was found, slumped over.
After that, some people thought that maybe TS itself would die out.
I heard people wonder about it.
How could its disciples continue teaching the self-actualization methods of a guru who’d died while he was practicing them?
*
The Lewksmn emerged from the prison of his body, from the man imprisoning him, and in doing so emerged from everything else in this entrapping world.
It was the truth when Wyde said it.
I saw how I, like everyone else, had understood nothing.
Few people understood what the slumped-over body in the desert meant, what it meant for us…
But Wyde made everything clear.
The Lewksman has shown us the way.
I believed Wyde.
*
The sun now as if a meter away.
Concentrate on the lightness beyond the light.
*
I concentrated on hesti. I learned, somehow, to know the vibrating glimmer as he described it.
But I was still carrying that body to an exercise studio where it panted and sweated and ached as I rotely contorted it. I still vigilantly measured and weighed it. I still rigorously exfoliated and cleansed and moisturized its skin twice a day, inspecting its surface for encroaching wrinkles and hairs and inflammation. I still sat in a salon chair for hours at a time, was handled and appraised for cracks and discoloration. I still bared my shoulders and arms and legs in a small, close room and recited the lines I had learned.
For a part, a role that would change things.
One break-out role away from stardom.
The part that could be the one.
All the contorting and measuring and preserving and reciting was for this.
All of it, for this.
But the body – how strange.
This flesh – one morning I saw it – smeared with white paste. The eyes staring out.
It was a body, and it was a prison.
One day, the glimmer would slough it off.
*
The stiff clusters of desert yucca. The glare of the sun behind their spiky blank faces.
*
The woman with a full, heart-shaped face and a cupid's bow for a mouth whose posture was among the most upright. The man whose receding blond hairline and carved but ruddy cheeks reminded me of a battered doll. The doughy woman whose heavy eye makeup and shorn head made it seem as if she'd just removed a wig of some sort.
I wondered sometimes if others who attended the lightenings were closer than I to sloughing off their bodies.
It was hard to tell. Talking among ourselves only served to further entrench us in this entrapping world.
Concentrate on the vibration, the glimmer, Wyde said. Concentrate to exclude everything else.
When I was away from him, on the carpeted floor of my apartment, I would stare out a narrow window. I tried to find hesti on my own. Continuous ... ever present ... a vibration ... a glimmering behind your eyes. That glimmer that is you. Always there. Constant, present, clarifying. This, I imagined, was what filled Wyde’s eyes with such light. So little separated the hesti that was him from the Plenos. The body he wore was almost a lantern.
The body I wore seemed more like a weight. I was feeling it for the prison it was.
The feet that stepped rotely onto the cold glass of the digital scale.
The thighs that pumped up and down on a bike that went nowhere.
The fingernails that glinted, the hard lacquered shell of them.
The tiny hairs that sprouted and had to be tweezed.
The pale flesh that remained though I pinched it.
The hours I spent in the body each day, like a prisoner staring at the walls of her cell. Appraising it, cleaning it, polishing its surfaces.
What would happen if I stopped?
I thought about this sometimes, about what that would mean. To just let the body crack and fade and crumble.
But the hesti within, Wyde told us, couldn't manifest fully without the practice of lightening. Only learning how to slough off the hindrances of sensations and perceptions, thoughts and doubts, ascending through all five phases of lightening, would allow the hesti to fully manifest.
And I, that which was concentrating, was still learning.
*
Learning how to be this pure, clear, clarifying quality without entrapping it in the prison that is the mind, that is the body, that is this entrapping world.
The wind rising up again. The sand, its fine dust. The Joshua trees in their frozen postures.
*
“I haven’t seen you in ages!” An actress I knew, just entering the huge modernist slab of our agent’s office building as I was leaving.
We had almost collided. Seeing her, her artfully arranged face, its perpetually smooth forehead and carefully sculpted eyebrows, I knew she saw the same in my face.
How strange.
I tried to smile.
She had heard, she said, that I’d read for that part. How exciting for me, to be up for that part. That would be huge, she said. It would, I said. Fingers crossed, we both said.
But I didn’t know. Not anymore.
The part that was the reason for everything. That had been the reason. For everything. Now the prospect of it seemed blurred, like lines on a page I could no longer read.
I couldn’t climb back inside the box of my car right away. But I had nowhere to go, and so I found myself wandering, aimless, along the grid of the Venice canals. I followed the straight line of one canal to the square corner of another. None of them led anywhere, just back and forth within the tiny grid.
I took one square turn after another, passing each neatly aligned house's tiny boat locked tightly to its tiny dock, none of them capable of going anywhere except for back and forth in the maze of the grid. The late-afternoon sky was the blue of a picture book, and the water in each canal glimmered, and I realized that it, too, went nowhere. It was trapped. I passed tiny dogs on short leashes, their tiny tails rigid, sniffing at the tiny strips of manicured lawn. The oversweet smell of the flowers. The waxenness of the ornamental succulents.
And then, unexpectedly, a wreck of a house, gutted, its bare beams like a skeleton with its ribs caved in. Empty.
*
But the pill in my hand.
Why a pill?
The lightening is what frees. The lightening alone is what sloughs off the body. Didn’t he believe I could?
The doubt rises and falls as I walk, as I try not to think, try not to feel.
Didn’t he teach me the … truth?
Only walking.
But the doubt rises and falls.
*
Wyde spoke of the kind of person who would never lighten.
“Such a man,” he said, “is like a prisoner who passes his life aimlessly behind bars. There are prisoners who claim that what they know is all that exists, that there is nothing beyond it. That kind of prisoner,” Wyde said, “should be left alone. He is stupefied and doesn’t want to do anything. As long as he remains in that state, he can’t be helped.”
“But,” said Wyde, “there are prisoners who want to escape. These are the prisoners who are not content with their surroundings, who suspect that there exists a much better place beyond the bars of the prison. They may even have a dim memory of that place beyond, but it has been obscured by all the years they've spent in prison. Still, they believe in the possibility of escape, and they believe it makes sense to try.”
“But the prison is well guarded,” Wyde said. “The walls are high, strong, and smooth. There are towers with searchlights and ever-alert wardens armed to the hilt. It is almost hopeless to think of escape. But it can be done.”
“Prisoners have escaped,” he said. “Those who are well prepared and led by guides. These guides know the area outside the prison and can live within as well as without.”
Looking sharply at us.
“But they cannot carry anyone outside.”
The stillness of the early morning as he spoke.
“All they can do is show them the way.”
*
Bare sand between bare shrubs that will take you in any direction you let it lead you. A hazy path, but always something that could be a path.
In the desert, everything looks like a path, anything could be a path.
