WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR: A Book That Changes Lives Read online

  “Hey, look,” I pointed. “It’s a gymnastics meet! Socrates, you’re nuts.”

  “I’m nuts?” he laughed quietly. “Look who’s sitting on the beam next to me.”

  “How are we going to get down?”

  “Same way we got up, of course.”

  “How did we get up here?”

  He scratched his head. “I’m not precisely sure; I had hoped for a front-row seat. I guess they were sold out.”

  I began to laugh shrilly. This whole thing was too ridiculous. Soc clapped a hand over my mouth. “Shhhh!” He removed his hand. That was a mistake.

  “HaHaHaHaHa!” I laughed loudly before he muffled me again. I calmed down but felt giddy and started giggling.

  He whispered at me harshly. “This journey is real — more real than the waking dreams of your usual life. Pay attention!”

  By this time the scene below had indeed caught my attention. The audience, from this height, coalesced into a multicolored array of dots, a shimmering, rippling, pointillist painting. I caught sight of a raised platform in the middle of the arena with a familiar bright blue square of floor exercise mat, surrounded by various gymnastics apparatus. My stomach rumbled in response; I experienced my usual precompetition nervousness.

  Socrates reached into a small knapsack (where had that come from?) and handed me binoculars, just as a female performer walked out onto the floor.

  I focused my binoculars on the lone gymnast and saw she was from the Soviet Union. So, we were attending an international exhibition somewhere. As she walked over to the uneven bars, I realized that I could hear her talking to herself! “The acoustics in here,” I thought, “must be fantastic.” But then I saw that her lips weren’t moving.

  I moved the lenses quickly to the audience and heard the roar of many voices; yet they were just sitting quietly. Then it came to me. Somehow, I was reading their minds!

  I turned the glasses back to the woman gymnast. In spite of the language barrier, I could understand her thoughts: “Be strong... ready... ” I saw a preview of her routine as she ran through it mentally.

  Then I focused on a man in the audience, a guy in a white sport shirt in the midst of a sexual fantasy about one of the East German contestants. Another man, apparently a coach, was engrossed with the woman about to perform. A woman in the audience watched her, too, thinking, “Beautiful girl... had a bad fall last year... hope she does a good job.”

  I noticed that I was not receiving words, but feeling-concepts — sometimes quiet or muffled, sometimes loud and clear. That was how I could “understand” Russian, German, or whatever.

  I noticed something else. When the Soviet gymnast was doing her routine, her mind was quiet. When she finished and returned to her chair, her mind started up again. It was the same for the East German gymnast on the rings and the American on the horizontal bar. Furthermore, the best performers had the quietest minds during their moment of truth.

  One East German fellow was distracted by a noise while he swung through handstand after handstand on the parallel bars. I sensed his mind drawn to the noise; he thought, “What?... ” as he muffed his final somersault to handstand.

  A telepathic voyeur, I peeked into the minds of the audience. “I’m hungry... Got to catch an eleven o’clock plane or the Dusseldorf plans are shot... I’m hungry!” But as soon as a performer was in midflight, the minds of the audience calmed, too.

  For the first time, I realized why I loved gymnastics so. It gave me a blessed respite from my noisy mind. When I was swinging and somersaulting, nothing else mattered. When my body was active, my mind rested in the moments of silence.

  The mental noise from the audience was getting annoying, like a stereo playing too loud. I lowered my glasses and let them hang. But I had neglected to fasten the strap around my neck, and I almost fell off the rafter trying to grab them as they plummeted straight for the floor exercise mat and a woman performer directly below!

  “Soc!” I whispered in alarm. He sat placidly. I looked down to see the damage, but the binoculars had disappeared.

  Socrates grinned. “Things work under a slightly different set of laws when you travel with me.”

  He disappeared and I was tumbling through space, not downward but upward. I had a vague sense of walking backward from the edge of a cliff, down a canyon, then into a mist, like a character in a crazy movie in reverse.

  Socrates was wiping my face with a wet cloth. Still strapped to the chair, I slumped.

  “Well,” he said. “Isn’t travel broadening?”

  “You can say that again. Uh, how about unstrapping me?”

  “Not just yet,” he replied, reaching again for my head.

  I mouthed, “No, wait!” just before the lights went out and a howling wind arose, carrying me off into space and time.

  I became the wind, yet with eyes and ears. And I saw and heard far and wide. I blew past the east coast of India near the Bay of Bengal, past a scrubwoman busy with her tasks. In Hong Kong, I whirled around a seller of fine fabric bargaining loudly with a shopper. I raced through the streets of São Paulo, drying the sweat of German tourists playing volleyball in the hot tropical sun.

  I left no country untouched. I thundered through China and Mongolia and across the vast, rich land of the Soviet Union. I gusted through the valleys and alpine meadows of Austria, sliced cold through the fjords of Norway. I tossed up litter on the Rue Pigalle in Paris. One moment I was a twister, ripping across Texas; the next I was a gentle breeze, caressing the hair of a young girl contemplating suicide in Canton, Ohio.

  I experienced every emotion, heard every cry of anguish and every peal of laughter. Every human circumstance was opened to me. I felt it all, and I understood.

  The world was peopled with minds, whirling faster than any wind, in search of distraction and escape from the predicament of change, the dilemma of life and death — seeking purpose, security, enjoyment, trying to make sense of the mystery. Everyone everywhere lived a confused, bitter search. Reality never matched their dreams; happiness was just around the corner — a corner they never turned.

  And the source of it all was the human mind.

  Socrates was removing the cloth strips that had bound me. Sunlight streaked through the windows of the garage into my eyes — eyes that had seen so much — filling them with tears.

  Socrates helped me into the office. As I lay trembling on the couch, I realized that I was no longer the naive and self-important youth who had sat quaking in the gray chair a few minutes or hours or days ago. I felt very old. I had seen the suffering of the world, the condition of the human mind, and I almost wept with an inconsolable sadness. There was no escape.

  Socrates, on the other hand, was jovial. “Well, no more time to play games right now. My shift is almost up. Why don’t you shuffle on home and get some sleep, kiddo.”

  I creaked to my feet and put my arm in the wrong sleeve of my jacket. Extricating myself, I asked weakly, “Socrates, why’d you tie me down?”

  “Never too weak for questions, I see. I tied you down so you wouldn’t fall off the chair while you were thrashing around playing Peter Pan.”

  “Did I really fly? I felt like it.” I sat down again, heavily.

  “Let’s say for now that it was a flight of the imagination.”

  “Did you hypnotize me or what?”

  “Not in the way you mean — certainly not to the same degree you’ve been hypnotized by your own confused mental processes.” He laughed, picked up his knapsack (where had I seen it before?), and prepared to leave. “What I did was draw you into one of many parallel realities — for your amusement and instruction.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a bit complicated. Why don’t we leave it for another time.” Socrates yawned and stretched like a cat. As I stumbled out the door I heard Soc’s voice behind me. “Sleep well. You can expect a little surprise when you awake.”

  “Please, no more surprises,” I mumbled, heading for home in a daze. I vague
ly remember falling onto my bed. Then blackness.

  I awoke to the sound of the windup clock ticking loudly on the blue chest of drawers. But I owned no windup clock; I had no blue chest of drawers. Neither did I possess this thick quilt now in disarray at my feet. Then I noticed that the feet weren’t mine either. Much too small, I thought. The sun poured through the unfamiliar picture window.

  Who and where was I? I held on to a quickly fading memory, then it was gone.

  My small feet kicked off the remaining covers, and I leaped out of bed, just as Mom yelled, “Danneeeey — time to get up, sweetheart.” It was February 22, 1952 — my sixth birthday. I let my pajamas fall to the floor and kicked them under the bed, then ran downstairs in my Lone Ranger underwear. In a few hours my friends would be arriving with presents, and we’d have cake and ice cream and lots of fun!

  After all the party decorations were thrown out and everyone had gone, I played listlessly with my new toys. I was bored, I was tired, and my stomach hurt. I closed my eyes and floated off to sleep.

  I saw each day pass like the next; school for a week, then the weekend, school, weekend, summer, fall, winter, and spring.

  The years passed, and before long, I was one of the top high school gymnasts in Los Angeles. In the gym, life was exciting; outside the gym, it was a general disappointment. My few moments of fun consisted of bouncing on the trampoline or cuddling in the backseat of my Valiant with Phyllis, my first curvy girlfriend.

  One day coach Harold Frey called me from Berkeley, California, and offered me a scholarship to the university. I couldn’t wait to head up the coast to a new life. Phyllis, however, didn’t share my enthusiasm. We began arguing about my going away, and we finally broke up. I felt bad but was consoled by my college plans. Soon, I was sure, life was really going to begin.

  The college years raced by, filled with gymnastics victories but very few other high points. In my senior year, just before the Olympic gymnastics trials, I married Susie. We stayed in Berkeley so I could train with the team; I was so busy I didn’t have much time or energy for my new wife.

  The final trials were held at UCLA. When the scores were tallied, I was ecstatic — I’d made the team! But my performances at the Olympiad didn’t live up to my expectations. I returned home and slipped into relative anonymity.

  My newborn son arrived, and I began to feel a growing responsibility and pressure. I found a job selling life insurance, which took up most of my days and nights. I never seemed to have time for my family. Within a year Susie and I were separated; eventually she filed for divorce. A fresh start, I reflected sadly.

  One day I looked in the mirror and realized that forty years had passed; I was old. Where had my life gone? With the help of my psychiatrist I had overcome my drinking problem; and I’d had money, houses, and women. But I had no one now. I was lonely.

  I lay in bed late at night and wondered where my son was — it had been years since I’d seen him. I wondered about Susie and about my friends from the good old days.

  I now passed the days in my favorite rocking chair, sipping wine, watching TV, and thinking about old times. I watched children play in front of the house. It had been a good life, I supposed. I’d gotten everything I’d gone after, so why wasn’t I happy?

  One day, one of the children playing on the lawn came up to the porch. A friendly little boy, smiling, he asked me how old I was.

  “I’m two hundred years old,” I said.

  He giggled, said, “No you’re not,” and put his hands on his hips. I laughed, too, which touched off one of my coughing spells, and Mary, my pretty, capable young nurse, had to ask him to go.

  After she had helped me regain my breath, I gasped, “Mary, will you let me be alone for a while?”

  “Of course, Mr. Millman.” I didn’t watch her walk away — that was one of life’s pleasures that had died long ago.

  I sat alone. I had been alone my whole life, it seemed. I lay back on my rocker and breathed. My last pleasure. And soon that, too, would be gone. I cried soundlessly and bitterly. “Goddamn it!” I thought. “Why did my marriage have to fail? How could I have done things differently? How could I really have lived?”

  Suddenly I felt a terrible, nagging fear, the worst of my life. Was it possible that I had missed something very important — something that would have made a real difference? No, impossible, I assured myself. I cited all my achievements aloud. The fear persisted.

  I stood up slowly, looked down at the town from the porch of my hilltop house, and wondered: Where had life gone? What was it for? Was everyone... ”Oh, my heart, it’s — ahh, my arm, the pain!” I tried to call out, but couldn’t breathe.

  My knuckles grew white as I clutched the railing, trembling. Then my body turned to ice, and my heart to stone. I fell back into the chair; my head dropped forward.

  The pain left abruptly, and there were lights I’d never seen before and sounds I’d never heard. Visions floated by.

  “Is that you, Susie?” said a distant voice in my mind. Finally, all sight and sound became a point of light, then vanished.

  I had found the only peace I’d ever known.

  I heard a warrior’s laugh. I sat up with a shock, the years pouring back into me. I was in my own bed, in my apartment, in Berkeley, California. I was still in college, and my clock showed 6:25 P.M. I’d slept through classes and workout!

  I leaped out of bed and looked in the mirror, touching my still-youthful face, shivering with relief. It had all been a dream — a lifetime in a single dream, Soc’s “little surprise.”

  I sat in my apartment and stared out the window, troubled. My dream had been exceptionally vivid. In fact, the past had been entirely accurate, even down to details I’d long forgotten. Socrates had told me that these journeys were real. Had this one predicted my future, too?

  I hurried to the station and met Socrates as he arrived. As soon as he stepped inside and the day-shift attendant left, I asked, “All right, Soc. What happened?”

  “You know better than I. It was your life, not mine, thank God.”

  “Socrates, I’m pleading with you” — I held out my hands to him. “Is that what my life is going to be like? Because if it is, I see no point in living it.”

  He spoke very slowly and softly, as he did when he had something he wanted me to pay particular attention to. “Just as there are different interpretations of the past and many ways to change the present, there are any number of possible futures. What you dreamed was a highly probable future — the one you were headed for had you not met me.”

  “You mean that if I had decided to pass by the gas station that night, that dream would have been my future?”

  “Very possibly. And it still may be. But you can make choices and change your present circumstances. You can alter your future.”

  Socrates made us some tea and set my mug down softly next to me. His movements were graceful, deliberate.

  “Soc,” I said, “I don’t know what to make of it. My life these past months has been like an improbable novel, you know what I mean? Sometimes I wish I could go back to a normal life. This secret life here with you, these dreams and journeys — it’s been hard on me.”

  Socrates took a deep breath; something of great import was coming. “Dan, I’m going to increase my demands on you as you become ready. I guarantee that you’ll want to leave the life you know and choose alternatives that seem more attractive, more pleasant, more ‘normal.’ Right now, however, that would be a greater mistake than you can imagine.”

  “But I do see the value in what you’re showing me.”

  “That may be so, but you still have an astonishing capacity to fool yourself. That is why you needed to dream your life. Remember it when you’re tempted to run off and pursue your illusions.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Socrates. I can handle it.”

  If I had known what was ahead, I would have kept my mouth shut.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE WEB OF ILLUSION
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br />   The March winds were calming. Colorful spring blossoms spread their fragrance through the air — even into the shower room, where I washed the sweat and soreness from my body after an energy-filled workout.

  I dressed quickly and skipped down the rear steps of Harmon Gym to watch the sky over Edwards Field turn orange with the sun’s final glow. The cool air refreshed me. Relaxed and at peace with the world, I ambled downtown to get a cheeseburger on the way to the U.C. Theater. Tonight they were showing The Great Escape, about a daring escape of British and American prisoners of war.

  When the film was over I jogged up University Avenue toward campus, heading left up Shattuck, and arrived at the station soon after Socrates came on duty. It was a busy night, so I helped him until just after midnight. We went into the office and washed our hands, after which he surprised me by starting to fix a Chinese dinner — and beginning a new phase in his teaching.

  It started when I told him about the movie.

  “Sounds like an exciting film,” he said, unpacking the bag of fresh vegetables he’d brought in, “and an appropriate one, too.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “You, too, Dan, need to escape. You’re a prisoner of your own illusions — about yourself and about the world. To cut yourself free, you’re going to need more courage and strength than any movie hero.”

  I felt so good that night I just couldn’t take Soc seriously at all. “I don’t feel like I’m in prison — except when you have me strapped to a chair.”

  He began washing vegetables. Over the sound of running water, he commented, “You don’t see your prison because its bars are invisible. Part of my task is to point out your predicament, and I hope it is the most disillusioning experience of your life.”

  “Well thanks a lot, friend,” I said, surprised by his ill wishes.

  “I don’t think you understand.” He pointed a turnip at me, then sliced it into a bowl. “Disillusion is the greatest gift I can give you. But, because of your fondness for illusion, you consider the term negative. You commiserate with a friend by saying, ‘Oh, what a disillusioning experience that must have been,’ when you ought to be celebrating with him. The word disillusion is literally a ‘freeing from illusion.’ But you cling to your illusions.”