for me, because ever since childhood, flexibility was not my friend. I couldn’t even touch my toes. I couldn’t sit in a cross-legged position, let alone in a lotus. This just added to the ever-growing separation I had first experienced in kindergarten. The drugs took away those feelings in the beginning, but not anymore.
There we all were, getting into position on the mountaintop. Since I didn’t haul a chair up the mountain with me, I found myself taking a kneeling position to maintain proper positioning.
“Okay,” I thought, “I’ve got it together: positioned properly, yoga pants on, hair is long (I hadn’t had a haircut since I was discharged from the Navy almost two years earlier), haven’t shaved. God, I’m looking good here.”
Then the reading started. Eyes closed, yet looking upward—they say this is where the third eye is, where the light is—I was high on LSD and had also smoked some marijuana. I was totally ready for the journey. About six or seven minutes into the meditation, my legs started to cramp, and I felt the circulation completely cut off.
“Ok, just listen to the prayers being read. You can transcend this feeling of pain,” I thought.
More time went on, but all I could hear were my thoughts: “I know I will never be able to walk again. I’m sure my legs are turning purple. I will have to be airlifted off the mountain. I can’t take it. I have to move, but then they will all know I’m not in a deep meditation.” At that point, though, I didn’t care. Slowly, and as quietly as I could, I changed positions. With every quiet bend, my knees would defiantly pop or lock themselves in place. Who knew enlightenment would be so painful? I had to lie down and stretch my legs out before it was too late. I lay on my back and started to extend my legs. The pain was really bad, but I got them straight, lay back, and tried to listen.
I thought, “This feels so good now. I can totally stay in this position as long as this goes on. And, hey, my back is still in a straight position.”
“I’m starting to enjoy this now. Whoops, it feels like there is a bug in my pants! Just focus, Tom. Don’t move!”
I stayed still, but I had to move again to scratch my butt. Then I had to pick my nose. “Stop it,” I shouted to my mind. “Can’t you stay focused?”
So there I lay, knowing everyone was in bliss and I was preoccupied with all these bodily sensations, when it hit me….
“God, do I have to pee! There is no way I can hold it much longer, but if I get up to go behind a tree, everyone will know that I’m incapable of meditating for any longer than a few minutes.”
As I look back on those days, I can see I was searching for something else. Something in me knew that there was a better life, and I knew meditation was one of the answers, but I couldn’t get it. First, I had to stop using. Not only did I not understand that; I didn’t know how to stop—yet.
Today I know that everyone is searching for a sense of freedom within, but when our seeking is misdirected, many of us turn to drugs, alcohol, money, relationships, or acquiring more things to fill ourselves. Our spiritual search becomes an endless, and at times terrified, hunt for fulfillment. We label people who abuse drugs and alcohol “addicts,” but isn’t craving of anything addiction? We fail to realize that all things are impermanent, and that nothing outside of us will ever take away our inner feelings of emptiness and isolation.
On a Sunday at 3:50 p.m., December 24, 1967, my daughter Celeste was born. The small one-story stucco hospital, which was built in the 1920s or 1930s and looked more like plantation housing, was located in Waialua on the North Shore of Oahu. It was nearly empty when we arrived. The doctor and nurse, who were to be in the delivery room with Laura, were the only staff there, and had asked me to watch the office and answer the phone. Were they serious? Of course I would watch the office. Turning an addict loose in a hospital is like releasing a kid in a candy store. I’m not proud to admit it, but while my daughter was being born, I was in the pharmacy stealing syringes and looking for drugs to shoot up. That feeling of being happy I’d had just a few months before was gone. It became too clear that I had no choice about shooting drugs. If I had ever had a choice, it was pushed out of the way as merely a distraction as I frantically searched the cabinets for injectable narcotics. Sadly, in an addict’s life, the drugs always come before everything else.
Celeste Noel Catton was a healthy, beautiful baby, and I was a proud father. Her birth was a good thing in my life, a very good thing; but even becoming a father couldn’t keep me clean.
Overpowering feelings of separation continued taking over my life, and I had no idea what to do about it. I kept taking drugs in an attempt to find that inner “God consciousness” I had read about in my spiritual books. Samadhi, joy, light, and love were what I knew I wanted, but my heart was running on empty. I had been running in place for too long. Despite the confusion and complete chaos in my life, I never forgot that simple line in my SRF lessons: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I thought maybe I should go to India to search for enlightenment, but the truth was I couldn’t even leave the North Shore and go to Honolulu, on the same island, let alone India.
Little did I know, my life was about to change dramatically in a way I never dreamed possible. The miracle was about to take place. The teacher was about to appear.
Celeste was now about two months old. I was a full-blown addict, and quite a far cry from the fatherly Ozzie Nelson on the popular 1950s TV show “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.” I loved my daughter and was primarily into the “spiritual seeking” part of my addictive drug use. I wasn’t shooting dope (except for the time I stole the syringes from the hospital) and mostly took lots of LSD and smoked hash. I was “meditating” and exploring various spiritual paths and gurus. The spiritual books and meditation lessons I was receiving in the mail gave no indication that drugs could help anyone on their spiritual path in any way. I had essentially sanctified my using by creating a self-invented religion of the time—one that allowed for “mind-expanding drugs,” but considered needle-driven drugs to be for “true” addicts. Only books written by others in the drug culture supported this behavior. Deep inside, I knew I had to stop. How many times had I said I would stop, only to pick up again and again? How does one stop this insanity? This inner voice would pose these questions to me in quiet and unguarded moments, but I would silence it with spiritual rationalizations or simply another hit off the joint.
Taking daily walks with my daughter in her little backpack carrier along Ke Nui Road, a small one-lane road with the main highway on one side and the ocean on the other, became a special part of my day. If I had any moments of purity or states of holiness in my life, they were found in these gentle strolls with Celeste. Our daily path was lined with foliage separating us from the busy main road. We would stop and admire the flowers and the tiny bugs that lived amidst the greenery, crawling here and there for us to watch. The earth would seem to come alive and attempt to impress us with this magical matinee. Since I didn’t work, I was able to spend every day with my newborn daughter. Yet, as we took our walks viewing the nature around us, the disease would pull me back. I was still feeling separated from the world and its inhabitants and was very paranoid at times. I was unable to experience the “oneness of life” that is promised by following the various spiritual paths I was reading about. I certainly didn’t identify with the freedom, love, and peace preached by flower children in the sixties. I was
