My Father and I

Since my own awakening I have been moving closer and closer to making sure that my father knew that I had truly forgiven him for what I remembered as the traumatic abuses of my childhood. One night a few weeks ago I called him and we talked and I think he really heard me for the first time…and it shook him. The next night he called me. And the story he had to tell was so brave of him and so beautiful that I felt it ought to be included here. Of course, there’s quite a bit of preamble before we get to the actual story, so please allow me to amble for a bit.

Apparently there were three brothers who came to San Francisco from Boston; Bill, Frank and Steve. Bill died when a house fell on him…and I was named for him. My grandfather, Francis Anthony Costello, was a charter member of the San Francisco Press Club. He was one of the reporters who covered the San Francisco earthquake. He later worked nights in a law office to study for the Bar Exam and eventually became a lawyer. Rumor has it he was a famous blind lawyer for many years.

I probably only met him two or three times. I remember a smart collie named Prince that served as his guide. And I remember he used to sit and listen to baseball on the radio (My Grandfather, not Prince.) Mostly, we kids were warned off. I don’t remember if he ever spoke to me or if he even knew who I was. I was maybe six or so.

I don’t remember Gram at this point. I remember her from much later after Grandpa died.

(I also remember my cousins Peg and Mary from this period. They were older, so we expected them to be snooty but they were so kind to us that I remained impressed for all of my life. The two girls were just incredibly gracious. They also seemed to be having such infectious fun between the two of them.)

Our family lived up in the San Francisco area (I was born in San Mateo) and we lived in Oakland until moving to Bell Gardens when I was in the third grade. As a result, we also felt like black sheep and were sort of removed from the San Francisco Costello’s. That is, we didn’t really get to know any of them very well.

Although I have many vivid memories of time spent with my mother’s parents when I was around 5, I have great chunks of memory missing from my childhood. I remember Bell Gardens just a bit. I remember what the little house looked like; white with blue trim surrounded by a bush that was known to have poisonous spiky berries. I got my appendix removed when we lived in that house.

I don’t really remember my father or any interaction between the two of us until we lived in that house. I just remember him spanking us (mostly me) fairly regularly,

There was one other incident that took place there. A couple came to visit us but I don’t know who they were. I don’t remember anyone else ever being in that house except this couple. They were on their way back from Tijuana because they had various tourist souvenirs including this big sombrero.

For some reason this couple paid a good deal of attention to me…and I was so terribly starved for attention. It was as though I really had no human contact ever. These people actually talked to me. It was so incredible and I felt so flush with the emotions that flooded through me.

In the midst of all this intoxicating attention, I simply had to find a way to keep them with me in some way. Not knowing better, I asked them for the sombrero. My parents were mortified and started to explain how utterly inappropriate I had been; how this was so rude and so terrible. Of course I was embarrassed beyond words, especially since I committed this great social blunder against these people who now meant so much to me. The internal pain was excruciating; that awful twisting in my gut. I should remember whether it was my mother or father who had been explaining the magnitude of my social thoughtlessness but maybe it was both.

I never really got over that; my first experience of how utterly painful embarrassment could be.

My real relationship with my Dad started after we moved from Bell Gardens to the brand, new 4-bedroom house on Beckner Street in La Puente where I grew up.

I would get home from school and try to spend time avoiding him. In a sense, it was like coming home and locking yourself into the tiger’s den. The tiger could be aroused to great violence at any time for any reason. He’d sit at the end of the dining room table and I’d wait to see how long it took before there was a beer in front of him. Once he started drinking it seemed like just a matter of time. I’d get whipped with his Marine Corps belt (like a razor strop) about three or four days a week. I could be exaggerating. The truth is long gone. There is only what “seemed to be”. We rewrite history with our pain.

I do remember one afternoon when I was maybe nine or so. Dad was well on his way to being plastered and he started this monologue. “I could have been somebody if it wasn’t for you. I could have made something of my life, but then you came along,” he droned. And then came the killer, “I wish you’d never been born.”

Yeah, I knew he was drunk. And in my heart I knew there was something “wrong” with him. But still, those words cut me to the quick. I had heard many variations over the years I suppose but they were never spoken with such intensity and malice.

It could have been that the start of my dismantling had been growing all along and it merely became cemented at this time. I had been so entirely neglected for so long before that afternoon. I seemed to have grown up feeling as though everyone else had a right to be here except for me. They had a right to breathe air that I really had no right to. For some reason, I didn’t deserve to exist. I grew up feeling “unloved and unlovable.”

These feelings could have been instilled all along or they could have all come from that afternoon. Also, I may have been merely seven that day and not 8 or 9. It’s so hard to know. It may have been (for all I know) the very first time that my father actually talked to me as if I were a person.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but Dad seemed to start talking to me a lot, mostly about how stupid I was. He seldom missed an opportunity to berate me in one way or another. It still seemed as if I’d get whipped three or four times a week. He’d slip up occasionally and grant that I did have a certain kind of intelligence, but absolutely no common sense, which of course he had in abundance. He just never let up and I of course was never allowed to speak.

He taught me to play chess but after the fourth or fifth game he couldn’t beat me anymore so we stopped playing chess.

I was often amazed at how this monster could sit beside his record player and listen to music with tears streaming down his face. How could he conjure up such sublime sensitivity from such cruelty and hatred? But somehow he passed his love of music down to me. I grew up on Erico Caruso, Mario Lanza, Phil Harris, Sinatra, Guy Mitchell, Eddie Cantor, The Andrew Sisters, The Mills Brothers and so many others.

When I was ten or twelve, his whippings turned into beatings where he’d beat me with his fists. I’d slump down into a corner of the room and he’d stand above me and work me over with his steel-toed work boots. Is this all true? It is exactly how I remembered it. But I also know how easily perception of the past gets flawed.

I do remember feeling what I perceived as having cracked ribs but he never did the kind of damage that would call attention to me, just bruised shins and sides. He never burnt me or anything too crazy like that.

There was actually a certain benefit to all those beatings I took. That is, I also became fairly adept at avoiding serious injury. I was very quick to cover and protect. My reactions were very fast and I could absorb a good deal of pain…all of which served me well over the next few years. Odd how I can justify that those beatings actually worked on my behalf but they made me stronger.

As I look back on it now, I have to consider the following. I don’t remember being bloodied. I was never in the hospital. I never had any broken bones. He must have out weighed me by 50 or 60 pounds. How was it that was never really hurt?

I was the second largest guy in my eighth grade class…and I was tough.

When I was 14, I was a varsity football player and a member of the varsity wrestling team. The following year at fifteen I was the San Gabriel Valley wrestling champion and life at home was intolerable.

It came to a head one night. Dad had me up against a wall in the living room, beating me with his fists and I’m just letting him beat on me. And then he says, “Don’t try any of that wrestling crap on me.” And I had to wonder. At this point he’s hardly doing any damage at all, but why should I just stand there and let him wail away on me? So I grabbed him, took him down, wrapped him up with one arm and drew back my fist. He was completely at my mercy in less than ten seconds. His face looked up at me with such panic and fear.

I could have messed up his face so badly. Mom was screaming in the background.

But I just couldn’t do it.

I left home that night and didn’t return for more than ten years. During that next ten years, particularly during my days in the Marine Corps, I would lie awake at night and spend time simply hating my father. It was almost as though I set aside time to actively hate him. It was downright weird. My jaws and fists were clenched and I just hated him…for all the pain and misery he caused me for all those wasted, cruel, tormenting, brutal years.

After Vietnam, after college, Himself (my first spiritual teacher) gave me an assignment to go visit my parents…if for no other reason than that this was something my Ego would least like to do. I approached the door on Beckner St. with great nervousness. Dad sat at the far end of the dining room table facing me with my back to the living room. Dad didn’t recognize me so Mom stepped in to introduce me. But nothing really happened that day. The old hatred was still around but mostly dissipated.

Actually, during my work with Nita, I came to feel as though my Dad wasn’t really as bad as I made him out. Lots of fathers beat their kids. I also felt that I was a unique and strong individual. That I was a sword that had been tempered in the fire and that I wouldn’t maybe have been that guy who won the Silver Star that day had I not “gone through the fire”.

Also, I had heard rumors of how my father was sent to religious boarding schools where he was whipped repeatedly by Franciscan brothers; whipped with ropes while tied across a rack. Rumors.

And more rumors about getting an extra check in the mail from the VA for being “shell-shocked” as a Marine at Guadalcanal. That is, he probably had a taste of the same PTSD that I was diagnosed with just a few years ago. No, I don’t really know anything concrete; just rumors.

The thing is, between the various things I learned about his life, I got to feeling that he never really matured beyond a certain age. That the damage visited upon him was far worse than my own.

I came to feel that Dad did the very best that he could with what he had to work with. The day he told me that he wished I’d never been born, he was sitting there with hardly any education, no career to look forward to except manual labor and three kids in the house…and drunk (which didn’t help matters much.)

I’d stop around once every couple of years over the next ten or twelve. There was even a time after I moved back to Los Angeles that I moved in to their guest bedroom for a couple of weeks.

After I married Teri and Chime got a little older, she had a certain need for family and we would drive the 25 miles from Eagle Rock out to the Glendora trailer park where the family would gather. Pretty much it was Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas…with another weekend or two thrown in.

I didn’t allow any of the old hurt or hatred to surface, but it would certainly gall me to see how easily Chime got along with her new Grandpa when she and I had such a difficult time together.
Of course time had turned the old tiger into a toothless tabby and he’d still get drunk enough to embarrass everyone occasionally. But there was never any attempt at violence.

And that’s pretty much how things were. We’d still see each other occasionally through my time in the psych ward and during my divorce. Mom and Dad were both supportive of my moving to Hawaii, although I was surprised to see from the look on his face that Dad was sincerely going to miss me.

After my awakening I knew that I couldn’t hold on to any shred of those old resentments and I started finding ways to let him know I’d forgiven him without actually saying it. I think that if I actually said that I was forgiving that we’d have to address the past and might embarrass him.

But I actually got around to saying it about a month ago; that I wasn’t holding on to anything and that I truly loved him. He thanked me and told me that he loved me too, but I could tell that there was something else. He rang off, obviously shaken.

The very next night he called me saying that he needed to talk. He told me that he had done something to get himself convicted to a child detention facility and his father ended up having to take him there. It was on the way back that the train was in the accident that blinded his father. So not only did he feel that he had blinded his father, the rest of the family was made to feel that way too, mostly at Gram’s direction. According to Dad, Gram would hit him every time he entered the room.

When he was released from the correctional facility, Gram paid for local thugs to come over and beat him up on a regular basis. I’m serious. Gram paid for regular sessions where grown men would come over to the house and give Dad a beating.

Dad was very near tears as he told me this story. And then he told me how sorry he was that he had let his violence cause him to hurt me so much.

I don’t think I’d ever heard words so brave and courageous and sincere.

I let him know that it didn’t matter anymore and that I truly loved him.

I called him again last night to ask if I could tell this story and he readily agreed. And then he added something maybe almost as beautiful.

He said, “I started out real bad, but I kept getting better.” And he was so right. He really did just keep getting better. Most people just keep getting worse.

Imagine what a beautiful world it would be if everyone started where they were but just kept getting better.

You done good, Dad. You done real good. And I love you deeply.


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You might note how my earlier writings on cancer being such a blessing. Although all hostility and resentment had been eradicated from our relationship, the final chapter in our saga didn’t have time to play itself out until just a month or so ago. I’d have never gotten to the end of his story…nor truly finished my own.

If you and your father or mother or son is in similar circumstances, find a way to talk. Get the unfinished business resolved.

This is the blessing of cancer: time.

Being Buddha: Living Awareness in the Unreal World

The following may be the most revealing, most interesting, most insightful that I have ever attempted. In my “New Years message”, I challenged each of you to become yourself…to discover that you are already enlightened. But if you take that challenge and turn it around, you might realize that I’m really asking you to deny everything you’ve ever believed.

I was asking nothing less than a mental leap into the unknown…into what may be nothing more than an aberrant mental error. That this error happens to be shared by Jesus, the Buddha, all the saints, wise men, gurus, shaman, Kaunas, magi and mystics for the past several thousand years is merely coincidence. And yet…somehow…we share the same vision: the truth that lies behind all the religions in history.

Still…from your point of view…I was asking you to do the impossible: to accept a mental picture of the existence and consciousness that was really far beyond your comprehension or imagination.

Over and over again, I have described myself as living in heaven; firmly grounded in harmony and bliss. I describe a situation where two worlds are superimposed over each other. You and I, we both live simultaneously in both worlds.

What I have failed to detail, is the fact that I cannot escape also living in the unreal world. Although grounded in the real world, I spend as much time in the unreal world as anyone else.

All of this occurred to me last night as I watched “An American President” on TV for perhaps the fifth time…the story always gets me. I cry in several scenes. Of course, I’m also a sucker for Shakespeare in Love, Funny Girl, Love Story….et al.

Romance is the most enticing emotion in the unreal world. It is also the cleanest and purest and the closest to approaching enlightenment itself…but it is also ultimately unreal. To be truly aware is to be like Jesus. You cannot love one more than another. The love you feel for a daughter or sister can be no deeper or stronger than the same unconditional love that you might feel for the incompetent sales clerk on the other end of the phone.

Conceptually speaking, for a professed Buddha to be hooked on romantic comedy is roughly equivalent to robbing grocery stores. Philosophically, there is little difference.

On the other hand, the unreal world…where I spend as much time as you do…is a world that is totally judgmental. Remember that the unreal world is a fully dualistic world, built entirely of words: of every possible variant of good and evil, right and wrong.

In this unreal world, I cannot help but be judged and found deficient. Unless…as many do…I simply sit and meditate with a silly grin on my face...I am subject to judgment. Anything that I might enjoy can be judged as less than spiritual. Every smile and every frown can be labeled as emotion or personality.

With every judgment…which is impossible to avoid…I can be found wanting. And if I can be found any less than perfect…when I have already declared myself awakened and therefore perfect…then I am equally guilty of either lying or just merely exaggerating the extent of my spiritual consciousness.

At that point, of course, nothing that I ever say can be taken at face value.

The reason that I happen to be perfect, by the way, is because there are no words with which to judge me in the real world where I exist…and no error that I am capable of committing.

Remember that I am defining enlightenment as the ability to discern the real from the unreal. The awakened and the unawakened both exist simultaneously in the real and the unreal worlds; the unawakened are firmly grounded in that unreal world of words whereas the awakened is rooted in the real and immediate.

To the unawakened, the unreal seems to be thoroughly real.

The unreal is the illusion.

The Spiritual Aspects of the Unreal World

In the beginning…

Well, in the beginning what we started with was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. According to the story, there was God and God created the world and all and everything. After getting the Garden ready for residence, God created Adam and then did some fancy surgery to make Eve from Adam’s rib…or so goes the story.

So Adam and Eve were fairly “blissed out”. The Garden of Eden was absolutely perfect. Every need was automatically satisfied. There was no conflict, no stress, no labor, no words, no depression, and no strain. There was apparently no clothing necessary. The weather itself was perfect. There was sun and trees and sand and seas and rainbows and sunsets and nature in all her magnificence.

It was nothing less than perfect existence. And God was always around in case they needed something new and different.

It was paradise. It is paradise.

It is “Eden before The Tree”.

The Tree?

Yes, well. As the story goes, God also had this tree. And for all we know, God placed that Tree for no other reason than to test out this theory he had about “free will”. Anyway, as the story goes, the Tree was called The Tree of Knowledge...or The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But God had flat-out told Adam and Eve, “You have all of paradise. Do whatever you want. There is no sin. Enjoy. Enjoy it ALL. Just don’t eat the fruit of that one Tree…The Tree of Knowledge. Stay away from it.”

You see, there was no good, nor evil in Eden. No need for words. If you needed something in paradise, either it was already there…or God would soon have it provided. Paradise didn’t need words for Good and Evil. Good and evil did not exist, why would we need a word for something that didn’t exist?

And then, according to the story, Eve got around to having a conversation with a snake and Eve ate of the apple on the Tree of Knowledge. The snake even suggested that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the tree because then they’d be as smart as God and God wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

Which ended up being true in a strange way…Knowledge had made God unnecessary. We adore Knowledge. Admit it, you KNOW that man has made Knowledge the new and reigning God…adored by far more of us in the civilized world. There’s always some sort of priest to talk to God for us.

But knowledge is POWER. And real power is everything.

Eve convinced Adam to join in…and the unreal world came into existence when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge.

They felt shame and fashioned clothes to cover their nakedness. They came to know good and evil. They came to know Right and Wrong.

Without words judgment was impossible; but with words judgment was inevitable.

A flood of words filled the earth, but of course, only man had the proper tools to utilize these new accoutrements. Words just didn’t seem to appeal to animals.

For some reason, words were like heavy narcotics to Adam and Eve. Humans became quickly addicted to stories…(simple things).

Man began to consider that he could pass judgment on God.

I have often gone on at length to try to define and describe the unreal world. Well, now you have it.

The unreal world is the Garden of Eden after the eating of the fruit. The unreal world is the world of words; the same world that is the Illusion…from the flood of words that overwhelmed us after the eating of the fruit. What was the fruit? Good and Evil; Right and Wrong: Judgment.

Eat hearty.

Remember still that the unreal world is that laboratory where we are sent to work out our spiritual problems. We are all just tortured souls on a spiritual journey, right? Where do you think that spiritual journey happens? The spiritual journey happens inside the Illusion, of course. That way, nobody really gets hurt. You didn’t think all those burning babies were real, did you?

So the illusion…the unreal world…are required components of the spiritual dynamic. If you didn’t have a place to come and work through your spiritual problems, then where would you go to work through these critical/crucial elements of your spiritual growth?

And my, oh my. What a world we’ve created with all our fancy words. Yes, we’ve created things like religion, philosophy, opera, some great novels, law, movies, NFL Football, medicine and psychology. The list of that which we have created using only words is awesome. Magnificent, really: a thing of wonder and delight.

Let’s examine what we have created.

By the fears of most social workers, the total of reported and unreported incest is probably somewhere between 30 and 50%. The amount of sex we force on our children is absolutely revolting. Of course, it’s mostly not reported…so we can all pretend that we don’t really know that it’s happening. But there are some laws that protect the fact that it will continue to happen. But we do know, don’t we? We just don’t talk about it.

If we only cared enough? We could do what it takes to stop it. Why are we so sick that we have chosen not to?

Think of all the advances in every last science…except psychology. Excuse me, yes we have developed better meds. Medications that will realign chemicals level to stop certain types of behavior.

But we haven’t made a single step towards improving the field of psychology.

We can’t really tell how sick and individual is. We have no idea how to cure him. We can test him and declare him sane and he will return to society and rape children within days.

Face it, we can do years and years of therapy…in prison or in fancy clinics…and accomplish nothing at all. Or we get better. (We haven’t a clue how that happens.) The one scientific failure of our society is psychology.

Focus on it for a second or so. We know, in our heart of hearts, that psychology solves nothing. If progress is ever made, we have no real proof that psychology had anything to do with the result.

There is a certain level of undisclosed insanity that runs through the core of every society. I estimate that is runs between 40 and 70%. (Actually, I reserved 75% for Hitler Germany where the good corporal goes to work and tortures Jews all day long and is judged by his society as being a good German. He may even get a citizenship award. But then, Cambodia ranked right up there for awhile. And there have been others throughout history.)

We arrange kiddy sex tours all over the world to carry our rich executives to meet with 8-year-old sex slaves. We could wipe this out. But we don’t care enough. There’s money involved, you see.

We have such a profound belief in the phenomenon called love. Love is somewhat different in the real world. But love in the unreal world is most peculiar. When a man or woman or even child is murdered, who is most likely to have killed them? Why someone who loves them, of course. This is not crazy? That we kill the ones we love?

And holy religion…with thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands littering the battlefields: the crusades, the past few hundred years in the Middle East, the “troubles” in Belfast. Even Hitler can be blamed under “religious persecution”. And still it goes on here today…in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How many deaths are worth a few more shekels in our pockets when we step away from the fueling station?

Then of course, there’s the whole undercurrent of unfocused frustration and rage and simply unloved and unlovable degenerates…who seem to find a reason to kill and maim and rape and torture….and they hardly need any reason at all.

Consider how many hundreds and thousands of children all over the world go to bed starving. Harry Chapin has shown us over and over that we have far more than enough to feed everyone, but we don’t choose to go to the effort. We would rather burn surplus food or toss it in the ocean. True. We choose to allow all those children to starve. Hell, they starve right here in America. There’s a local ad that reports that, in Hawaii of all places, 60,000 children go to bed hungry. (Ph: 808 836-3600 http://www.hawaiifoodbank.org.)

Hundreds of thousands dead each morning all over the world…their little bellies painfully distended. They were all found dead this morning, dead because we chose not to spend like 8 cents to ship food. And it’s just too damn inconvenient to dig out that nickel and three pennies for Raul, and another for Pietro and Ji Goon. Really damn inconvenient.

Then again, there will be millions and millions dead as we continue to keep AIDS medication too high for the population of an entire continent to afford. We generally hate homosexuals and we have to assume that AIDS and HIV are just God’s little clean-up program, right?

Perhaps one of the strangest forms of the evidence of rampant craziness…is our insistence on the destruction of our planet. We burn our rain forests as quickly as we can, we pollute our rivers, destroy our wet lands, destroy levels of the marine food chain, over-fishing our oceans, and burn fossil fuel as if it will never end.

We are strangling our planet to death.

We know this.

We ignore this.

The wonder is why we choose to ignore this.

Are we all pretending that we don’t understand this?

The only thing we don’t know is exactly when that line will be crossed. But in a way, that makes it very safe for us continue. Weird. One of us will actually be responsible for driving the last nail into the coffin of mankind, but since we’ll never know which of us… Well, we’re not to blame, are we?

It’s like the one of us to kill off the planet? We’ll be wearing hoods. Or the one to be executed will be wearing a hood. Can we somehow get a river to wear a hood? Or a tree maybe? This could make a great TV special if we could only nail down the exact action …oh, yeah, I see. That would spoil the whole point.

We really can’t know cause then maybe we’d have to back off…..even stop. We’d have to stop the destruction of our planet, our species. Hell, we don’t know that this step will be the final irreversible step. We can’t know that, right.

We know that there is a point, sometime in the future, where we will turn on one more oven or dump just one more vat of mercury in some unspoiled stream…and we will have passed over the line…the line between “Yes, there is still a chance that our planet might still survive”, and “No, we just passed the point of no return. The planet will only survive between 16 and 30 years. It’s too late now to do anything. Would you like to buy a new car?”

It was Thoreau who mentioned those “lives of quiet desperation”, wasn’t it? Have those number of lives diminished over the past hundred years or has the level of rampant insanity simply gotten much worse?

Do you think that the current level of cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, crystal methadone, sh’rooms, morphine, designer drugs, ecstasy…do you think that this is evidence that we have found a greater peace within?

What percentage of our population would you estimate is at least semi-suicidal? I mean, between the cigarettes and the drugs, the alcohol and the freeway speeding? How suicidal do we need to be until we swing our entire society from almost crazy to full-on nutzo?

But like I say, we need this particular level of time and space in order to play out the crazy Dance of Life. We need to learn, to fail. We need to indulge. We need to sin.

All of us who enter here…this unreal world…this world of words…are merely more twisted souls come to trudge out our spiritual journey along these rocky shores.

We are taught “how things are” from the moment we can understand the words…and then we go on to lie and cheat and hurt each other. We learn to be kind and to be cruel. We excel or we create hell. We become poets or pimps. We are molesters, murderers, mobsters and various mercenaries. We are saints and sinners, rich and poor, dead and dying, enlightened and basic Neanderthal sludge. Welcome to the spiritual path.

And we all come to this time and space to work out our spiritual journey…precisely because this is the raison d’etre of this unreal place…the Illusion.

The real world (the Garden of Eden before the Tree of Knowledge) and the unreal world (the world created entirely of the words accumulated in our heads.)

By the way, do I know that the unreal world and the Illusion are one and the same? No, of course not; it just sort of makes an ironic sort of justice. Just a loony belief I have. I’m nothing more than a crazy old man, remember?

Note: The unreal world is entirely without any real things…made totally of past memories and future hopes and fears. It holds not a single baseball, orange, waterfall, computer mouse, sand, pizza, etc.

The cosmos saves the real things for the real world.

Ain’t it funny how that works?