In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the late Joseph Campbell describes the journey which the mythic hero experiences.  A pivotal time comes when the hero has seized the sword of their destiny and undertakes a long, grim voyage to meet their nemesis for a final battle.  In The Writer’s Journey, Hollywood story consultant, Chris Vogler, calls this part of the adventure The Road Back.

I love to drive cross country.  Sometimes I’ll write about the tests, allies and enemies I encounter as I slice west through the Plains with an ocean of energy, fueled by anticipation and excitement about what I might find.  But the road back east, when my belly’s empty and my tank’s empty and my mind’s emptied by thousands of minutes of hurtling darkness, when I’m due in Chicago the next day . . . Those grueling slogs I seldom write about.

Still, I labor in those deserted midnights, burbling ideas about haunted highwaymen for stories, chattering my observations about truck stops in my antique, GE microcassette recorder.  Listening to ultra-up-tempo trance music (usually Hybrid or Paul Van Dyke).

Since I relinquished caffeine of any sort for this particular voyage, only the music and a miracle keep me from wrecking into an overpass.  My weary eye, deranged from dyssomnia, drags the median and the shoulder for the outline of a prowler.  I’ll glide from red light island to red light island, catching up and leaving behind the Christmas light chains that mark the silhouettes of 18-wheeler convoys stretching in an unending archipelago coast-to-coast along I-80, I-70 and I-40, my usual routes.  After about 10:00 tonight, they’ll be the only company I pass as I rocket a straight 80 along I-80.  I stop only for fuel pumped in through one hose and to excrete used fuel out from another kind of pump.

This trip, I’d been reading The Essential Ken Wilber.  He writes about something called the Witness Exercise, which he describes as a synthesis of mystical traditions which can lead, through self-inquiry, to the transcendent Self beyond our ego identities.  What you’re supposed to do is recognize that your identity isn’t bound up with your physical self, or with what you think, feel, want, say or do.  Since you can know your thoughts, look at your wants, can sense your body physically, and can feel your emotions, that means your thoughts, feelings, desires and body are mere “objects” of apprehension.

What I can know and apprehend is not the one who knows, writes Wilber.  So thoughts, feelings, desires and your body will come and go, will be born and die, but they have nothing to do with who you really must be.  The reason is that reality is too extensive to be identified with one object, one experience or a single aspect.  Reality isn’t composed of the elements which it contains.  The Upanishads state that individuality arises by identification of the Self, though ignorance, with these elements.

I get bored, and a little tired and smelly, when I’m driving 24+ hours straight.  The meth music wears off, my phone’s in one giant drop zone, and no one will take my call at 2:00 a.m. anyway. When I can’t sing It’s Been Awhile by Stained one more time, I’ll try anything, even meditation.  I decide to adapt the Witness Exercise to my road weary exile.  I have a thought or a feeling, and I dissociate it from my true identity. It went something like this:

I am not my fear thought about getting home in time to sleep before work Monday.  I am the Witness, to my fear thought about getting home in time to sleep before work Monday. 

Now, most of my thinking at 2 a.m. isn’t too sound.  I’d have a pre-emptive resentment against the imaginary cop who I imagined was going to stop me.  So, I’d say (or think, it doesn’t matter):

I am not my resentment against the fantasy Nebraska trooper who I imagine will stop me 20 miles hence.  Rather, I am the Observer of my resentment against the fantasy Nebraska trooper who I imagine will stop me 20 miles hence. 

I decided to apply the Witness Exercise to thoughts or feelings I judged as good, just as well as to thoughts or feelings I deemed bad.  It didn’t matter.  I decided to apply it to all my ideas, about anything and everything that came to mind.

This became rather tedious, kind of like having to keep my hands on the wheel of my mind so I wouldn’t drift into the ditch of post-midnight negativity. I soon found myself asking whether this whole exercise was a stupid waste of time, like my law degree.  But I had nothing better to do.  And the Bible says that we’d know something by the fruit it bore.  Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. Assess it by whether it works or doesn’t.  So if I got results from the Witness Exercise by the time I got back to Chicago, if I attained greater awareness, then maybe I was only half-stupid for trying it.

I noticed there was a lot of drift in my thoughts.  I wondered why it was in the nature of mind to drift.  I also noticed there were a lot of attack scenarios flaring in my head. Soon, it became apparent that many, if not most, of my thoughts were fantasies which were themselves based on fantasies.  When I added to the Witness Exercise a meditation from A Course in Miracles, which asks me to look upon the various objects and entities in the world and tell myself that they’re not really there, I realized that almost all my thoughts were fantasies about things that didn’t really exist.  My thoughts were all bullshit.  And since my feelings were often based on my thoughts, they were BS, too. I was angry about a trooper I had thought into being, giving him all kinds of bad characteristics, like stopping imaginary people going over the speed limit.  Soon, I had the trooper being drunk and threatening me.  So I call 911 and get another trooper over here and paint them into a corner, telling them that if they write up that speeding ticket or throw me in jail for back-talking, I’ll, like, blackmail them by telling the governor of Eastern Nebraska on them.

These were the narratives of attack and counterattack breaking like armies back and forth across the ground of my mind.  They were fantasies.  Yet my body often reacted as if the things were really happening.  My heart would beat faster.  I’d sweat and get flushed, all over a made-up drunken state policeman pulling me over for driving sober.

I started to apply the Witness Exercise to everything.  I am not Mike Just.  I am not the son of my mother, or the brother of my brother.  I am the Witness to Mike Just, who thinks himself the son of his mother, the brother of his brother.  Everything I thought I was, all the roles I or someone else assigned me, were suits my ego slipped on; false identities or temporary associations.  Even the good things I slapped on myself—You’re a giving person—were just jackets my ego tried on.

I rode up a little too close on the apron of a semi.  I am not looking at the back of the truck.  I am the Observer of the one looking at the back of the truck.  The back of the truck is not real.  It will not crush me.  It is okay to get too close.  Do it.  It was 3 a.m.  Even the Observer was turning on me now.

You Wouldn’t Have a Map If You Were Supposed to Stay Lost

Why would God give us the way to transcendent knowing, something like the Witness Exercise, unless God intended for us to escape the unreality of the 3-D world? Who made that unreality is anyone’s guess, and what was its purpose, no one could prove.  Wilber wrote about “the perennial philosophy,” the summation, or rather the commonalities that most religious, philosophical and mystical teachings pointed toward.  One of the elements of this common philosophy was that people were living in a “fallen or illusory state.”  The branch of Christianity called Gnosticism agreed.  Hindus speak of maya¸ or the illusory state identified with the world.

Right there, as I passed a rest stop with semis lumbering in the High Plains heat like elephant seals beaching themselves on some rocks, I broke with that part of the perennial philosophy.  I don’t think a perfect system such as God could evolve imperfection, even if God gave its creatures free will.  Though the various schools of Gnosticism or medieval Jewish mysticism strive to explain how such a fall could occur, none fully explain why.  Perfection couldn’t create anything which could make an imperfect choice, unless it allowed the Fall from Grace on purpose.  To believe anything else was to put God in the uncomfortable position of judging its creation for having made an error.  And that was to say God was judging Itself, since its creation couldn’t exist apart from it.  It was also to believe that God, which was perfect, could give rise to imperfection.  That was like saying that an apple tree made oranges.

I don’t believe God can judge us or anything else.  God must have relinquished judgment, just as God has asked us to do in other parts of the perennial philosophy.  Why would God do something She told us not to do?  God’s not a hypocrite.

Three corollaries followed from this.  First, it’s not our fault we’re in this maze.  Second, this world was an intentional digression that God made, so that God could experience what It is by experiencing what It is not.  Therein lays the glory of God.  God could only fully realize Its own glory if It invented Its perceived opposite, a fictional straw man called Evil.  So God created the Great Game.  Neal Donald Walsh writes about this in Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue. 

And third, we are eventually intended to solve the puzzle and leave the maze.  Eventually, the Great Game must end and we must return to paradise.  That’s why the mystic knowledge has been given now, and not at some other point in the chronology of creation.  It’s why, in this moment in time, the universe evolved itself an intelligence by which it can know itself, and by which it can draw a map which traces a spiritual wormhole out of the universe itself.

It must now be time to come home.  Otherwise, we’d still be dinosaurs.  I was supposed to be using the Witness Exercise right now, since it had been given me.  T-rex didn’t have it. All it had was bad breath. When the student is ready, the lesson is given.  Or else I’d still be drunk on a bench somewhere.  And I guess I was also supposed to be passing this knowledge onto others.

Don’t Say You Got It or You Don’t Got It

I couldn’t claim to have this solution, this wisdom which would deliver me from the attack lurking in my mind.  To claim that I had arrived at the solution was to stay I irrevocably owned it and could stuff it in a jar. I hadn’t arrived in a Promised Land.  I couldn’t retire on it and keep it in the bank.  I was driving down I-80 at 3:30 in the morning resenting imaginary cops.  Of course I didn’t have it.

No, it was something I was developing.  Like all beings, from cyanobacteria to the Dali Lama, I was in the process of recollection, of looking at who and what I really was.   And I really shouldn’t have been referring to it as mystic knowledge or to myself as a mystic or even as an adherent of mysticism.  For the ego appropriates everything, even God; perhaps especially God.  But I’d been given a roadmap out.  I wouldn’t have been presented a method like the Witness Exercise unless I was supposed to use it.

“So, use it, Maddog,” the radio said to me, even though it wasn’t on.

Dude, You’re Stoned and Don’t Even Know It

So use it I did.  All I had to do was look – look at myself, at others, at the world and its history.  I wasn’t supposed to think, to conclude or to analyze.  Thinking was what had gotten me into this mind trap to begin with.  So I looked. I observed.

I began to see that the world itself was an allegory.  Funneling down this corridor of darkness painted by halos of pumpkin light; oncoming headlights across the wide median dropping down a hill in the darkness like a spaceship; dreamy, damp air rushing in through the open window at 80 MPH, carrying the sweet scents of dung and wheat.  A strip joint; the carcass of a dog on the shoulder; an abandoned Winnebago riddled with shot.  The ugliness in the world was no more real than its beauty.  The world was both a method of self-hypnosis and the manifestation of the hypnosis itself.  I’d mesmerized myself into an earth of four-lane interstate and Middle East war and hurricane disaster.  How powerful a hypnotist am I.  No one else lulled me here.  I cast a spell on myself and dreamt the world-state.

In and of itself, the world was really nothing, just like a series of letters on a page are nothing unless I make something out of them and seed them with meaning.  Maybe the maze of the world was just one big page of apophatic, alphabetic nonsense.

But if the world was itself an idea, I also saw that I had ideas about the world.  I had ideas about the original idea called the world.  My conceptions about that trooper – now an Iowa trooper instead of one from Nebraska – were simply notions organized around an original theme.  My impressions about the back of a truck, or what a dirty name “Kum ‘n Go” is for a roadside convenience mart, were whims about daydreams.

So most, if not all, of my thoughts are about nothing.  I think about nothing.  When I read the news, I get myself worked up over nothing.  Even my most sublime visions, my contemplations about mountains, canyons, the subtle reflections of a sunset or the majesty of a symphony, are no more real than my fantasy about rising to Pulitzer prowess.  That last one was hard to let go of.  But what can you say about a man who ends his sentences with prepositions or begins them with conjunctions. Oy!

I spend most of time reeling in delusions of reveries, each one more displaced than the last.  I spin chains of fancies that I convince myself are completely real.  I am lost in dreams within dreams spun in yet dreams.

You’ll Need a Garbage Bag for All That Experience

My emotions are also unreal.  I am not my frustration about road traffic.  I am the Observer of my frustration about road traffic.  Since road traffic isn’t real, since it’s just a definition in my mind that will differ depending on whether I’m from NYC or Garden City, Kansas, how can my feelings about my definitions be any more substantial?  Thoughts give rise to feelings, which elicit desires, and the three – thought, feeling and desire – push and pull upon one another, creating eddies alongside the main current of mind.

If my interpretations of my experiences are the cause of my bad feelings, then it is only my observation of my feelings and the conditions which seem to cause them that can lead me to any kind of detachment.  By stepping back from the experience and realizing that I am the container of all experience, I begin to find my way out of the maze.  It’s a thought anyway.

But No One Gets Out of Life Alive

If I can observe my thoughts and feelings, my desires and experiences, if I can witness my actions and my body, there must be something in me greater than the thinking, the feeling, the wanting, the doing, the experiencing, and the old rag I call my body (hey, I’m old now).  These six aspects are what I used to call me.  But I’m more than I believed I was.  I have to be, or I wouldn’t be able to observe these six aspects.  I would be lost in them, with no ability, for example, to observe a tirade while I’m in the middle of one.  Yet because I can look at my anger, I have a fuse just slightly longer than the anger itself. I transcend its bounds, and no longer drown in the emotion.

That doesn’t mean I don’t feel my hemorrhoids or that I don’t worry about being audited.  It means that my awareness serves as a container that contains the thoughts, the feelings, the body and its wants, experiences and actions.  It doesn’t mean I get to go to the top of a mountain and leave the rest of peopledom behind.  Gandhi didn’t do that.  No, he stuttered when he spoke to a judge in court.  Mandela didn’t leave his people behind.  He went to prison for a long time.  Jesus didn’t abandon his people to the Romans.  He got his feet wet in the Galilee.  Not to compare myself to a bodhisattva, the Buddhist saint who, though achieving enlightenment for herself, returns in bodily form to help others into the lifeboat.  I’ve got more to learn than any of the proper names I’ve just mentioned.

it Isn’t It Unless it Knows It Is

What a supreme challenge, to dig into the dirt like a prairie dog, but to chant prayers along a canyon rim.  I hold both the sacred and the profane within my skin.  Realizing that I somehow transcend these opposites, I hold the good wine sloshing around with the bum wine in the single vessel that bears my name.  And yet, I stretch far beyond the boundaries of the cosmos.  I am the Self which wears the smaller self like a hand wears its glove.

It’s hard to translate the Self into the world, where It begins to forget what It is; where so soon the Self forgets, so that It becomes just a self.  Where it’s born as an it at the moment of the Big Bang.  And the it tries to stuff everything it perceives as outside of its shivering skin into itself in an attempt to blow itself back up into Itself, yet it won’t accept the one awareness that can transform itself back – acknowledgement that it need do nothing, be nothing, have nothing, and rid itself of nothing, in order to be what It is.

And then, when the self realizes it already is all that grandeur, that it never had to do anything to become the Self because it already was It, it’s hard to feign being one down so others aren’t threatened by the fact that God is you.  You aren’t God, yet God is you.  And so ego clings to the littleness in its being, to its old jackets of would-be fame and pretend glory, for its self-perpetuation.  It commits the only sin: it stays small. It stays an it.

The challenge is to make my real insides my real outsides.  Then I can go home.  I am not who I think I am.  I am not my name.  He’s just a suit I borrow while I’m here.  I am not who I think I am. Neither winner nor loser.  I am something beyond terms.  I’m beyond good and evil, right and wrong.  Humanity has suffered from an identity crisis ever since it called itself humanity, and ever since people tried to be righteous so they could soar back to a heaven they’d never left.  Maybe it’s time to call ourselves by a new name.

Whatever It Is Is Whatever It Is, Is It?  Whatever.

I am Whatever Is.  That statement is self-evident.  It does not need proof.  It’s not subject to verification.  I must be whatever is in existence.  I cannot be what is not in existence.  I can’t be anything less than what is in existence.  And this must mean I’m coextensive with creation and creator.  The two are one.

I am Whatever Is.  I must be that thing.  I will not try to define that something.  To attempt a definition is to deny all other things it is and could be.  It is to limit Whatever Is.  Categorization is just an attempt to limit what I am, to redefine it into something smaller.  To call light ‘white’ is to deny that it contains all the colors in the spectrum.  To describe myself is to belittle myself.  And what I think about myself, one way or the other, doesn’t mean a damn thing.  It doesn’t make a bit of difference as to what I really am.  What I call myself doesn’t matter.  I can’t change my identity through definition or analysis.  I can’t change what is changeless.  I can’t call it into question, cast it low, or build for it a throne higher than it already sits upon.

It cannot be exalted.  It cannot be defiled or sinned against. I cannot save myself or be saved by a fictional other.  I can’t get closer to myself by seeking myself.  I can’t get closer to myself than I already am.

And so, I can neither curry God’s favor nor incur God’s wrath.  God cannot be bargained with or appeased, joined with or opposed.  What we must recognize is that there is nothing to negotiate.  There can be no covenant made between humanity and whatever is, since we are whatever is.  There can be no terms made with life.  I can’t lie to it or kiss its ass.  I can’t make sacrifices to it which will change its attitude toward me.  It wants nothing, needs nothing; not my gratitude, not my worship, not my glorification of itself.  I simply reflect its infinitude by virtue of my existence.

God doesn’t exercise dominion in the way humans have come to lord authority over each other.  God doesn’t exercise power in the ordinary sense.  God isn’t centralized, and the proof is that the universe itself has no center. God does not coerce, enslave or blame.  God doesn’t try to possess any more than light possesses when it breaks through a cloud to touch the object which it casts itself upon.  God does not contain any more than water contains when it gushes from a desert spring.  That’s good news, isn’t it?

Life Does Not Negotiate

What a relief it was that steamy night along the ghost highway, I-80, when the temperature didn’t break below 91 and I couldn’t use the AC, what a relief to discover that I couldn’t negotiate with life.  I didn’t have to worry about trying to change God’s mind anymore.  I didn’t have to beg God to save the world through my prayers.  I didn’t have to earn salvation through right conduct.  I didn’t have to worry about whether I lusted or not.  Oh my God, what a relief!

Ah, but there’s catch (always is, isn’t there?).  What this also means is that I can’t make life into what I want it to be.  It stayed in the 90’s the whole way from Pueblo, CO to Chicago, IL.  Life is whatever it is.  I can’t light a stormy sky.  An attempt to change life subverts our will, which is God’s will really, into fantasy and delusion, into disconnected bits of broken imagery with no narrative.  And I’ll suffer to the extent those fantasies don’t match up with whatever is.

 Expectation – Reality = The World

Ultimately, it’s not so important whether my fantasies match up with what worldly conditions are.  In fact, my fantasies are my experience of the world.  The images conjured by my mind constitute the world.  I’ll suffer to the extent my will doesn’t correspond with what life’s nature is, with what my inmost nature is.  To the extent my delusions don’t match up with the reality of what is, that is the measure of the world.

The world arises to fill the gap between the ego’s aspirations and reality.  The size of that gap determines the extent to which I will suffer.  The difference between God and human expectation constitutes the world itself.  That difference is the fantasy we call the realm of sensate experience. I create the margin between heaven and hell, the distance between suffering and nirvana.

But since I’m already as close to salvation as I’ll ever be, all I can do for myself is to recognize that I inhabit a dream and am drunk upon its contents.  All I can is to recognize that my thoughts about anything aren’t real, and that my feelings aren’t either.  Since my words and my languages are a description of the world, they, too cannot serve as any basis for meaning.  I can’t change the fact I think it real.  But I can look at it and acknowledge that it’s not.  There will then come a time when what is real becomes apparent.  There will come a time beyond time, when we will see what is beyond sight.

I babbled into my hand-held recorder.

I passed an adult bookstore.  Do I really want to be That Which Is?

Being God Is One Helluva Lot of Work 

To believe that God is me in the world, rather than the helpless being I think I am most of the time, with ends in space and in time, is to know that I will be protected, and cared for by my Self.  That is such a bright promise.  There really is nothing to fear.

Do You Really Want to be God in the World?

Nah, I don’t want to be that big.  I don’t want to be the seer and the seen.  I don’t want to be God in the world, because I want something bigger than myself to protect me.  If God = me, who, then, will be bigger than me?

Freud was right.  There is a certain wish fulfillment in religion.  We want to own this archaic Father figure that will protect us from the awful responsibility of Godhood.

And yet the irony is that I think I’ve killed that God off.  I need it, but I hate it.  I crave it but I fear it.  I don’t want to take responsibility for being a bud on the Tree of Life.  So, what I’d rather be is a god, with a little ‘g.’ Be my own tree.

Still, when all the drama drains out like the last of the water from the bathtub, what’s a dude to do?  How am I to make my living on this planet without a sense of threat to defend against?  How am I to define myself without the chill of danger shivering up my core?  The boundaries of my skin are the boundaries of a fortress, drawn in self-protection.  My identity is organized around my need to defend a self.

And I need the drama, people.  Without the balance of heaven and hell dribbling through my fingers, life would be . . . boring.  I wouldn’t know how to live my life if all the stakes in all the scenes were shaken out of the script.  Without angst and turmoil, who am I really?  I’d have to take off that jacket and let God be me, naked and raw and bright, a leaf shivering in the silver sky.  What role can I fulfill?  I have to have a part.  I have to have an act.  I have to act.  Heaven is pretty boring.  I guess maybe I’m not ready to try on my God suit just yet.

What I fear most is my greatness, as Nelson Mandela so eloquently put it.  So I stay put.  There is a littleness that stalks my being.  The small are vulnerable, and the vulnerable are afraid.  With fear inevitably comes guilt.  I stay glued to my corporeal form because I’d feel guilty if I just woke up and left everybody else behind.  To say that I fear my greatness is to say that I’m absolutely terrified of the responsibility of choosing.  It’s to leave blame and guilt behind, suits which feel as comfortable against my skin as tepid water in a dirty bath feels when I’ve wallowed too long in its mire.

To conceive God as living through me, to have no God above me, is a terrifying realization.  To have nothing larger, nothing more expansive which contains me, nothing more timeless than me in this very moment, is a scary and crazy notion.

Until the idea of my own Godhood no longer terrifies me, I won’t be ready to accept it.  I will therefore deny that I am whatever is, that my skin is the far boundary of the universe.   That is perhaps why we hide our Self from ourselves, and dare blaspheme the naming of ourselves Infinite by calling it blasphemy.

Those are the conclusions you’ll come to when you refuse to drink caffeine and drive deep into the heat and black of the Plains in midsummer.  It’s where your mind will take you when you work the Witness Exercise for hours straight, with nothing but the red-nosed backs of racing rigs upon which to train your crazy stare.  When you’re tired of all the trance music, and there’s no one left to talk to or blame, eventually, you have to stop listening to yourself and start listening to Yourself.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within