Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  “The problem with the intellect,” Ram Dass said, “is that it doesn’t allow you to escape from dualism. That is, it always thinks about something. So, it always takes an object. So, as long as you identify with your thinking mind, you are always one thought away from where the action is. You’re always thinking about it. Or looking at it. You’re always one thought away from life.” I realized that for me, God itself had become another thought that my brain could think about, which always kept it at arm’s distance. But getting to Detroit, or the Kingdom of Heaven, or Nirvana, was about resting in consciousness without an object. Just pure, unencumbered awareness.

  I had prayed to think about God and to think about my problems with him listening in like a divine NSA, which meant that prayer was just my way of inviting God to listen in to the stream of endless thinking I was doing nonstop anyway. “Dear Jesus” meant, “Start listening, God!” “Amen” meant, “Okay, go back to whatever you were doing. Over and out!” My capacity to connect was limited by how well I could think about connection. It was the same way I used to go to museums to think about art.

  Ram Dass showed me the trap: the mind thinks about things, so of course it wants to confine and reduce both art and God into objects, so it can think about them. But going beyond the mind—it turns out that’s how to appreciate both a Pollock and the Divine. Or a dance, a play, sex, or Miles Davis.

  SO I GAVE MANTRA A TRY.

  Valerie and I had been living together for a year by then and had recently discovered a beautiful botanical garden near our home. I wasn’t yet comfortable looping Sanskrit in my mind—it was still too woo-woo for me—so I decided to go with her, determined not to think about the plants, flowers, and trees, but to simply look at them and think, if anything, “Yes, thank you.” This was my first attempt at looking without thinking.

  I can’t tell you what a shortcut to the transcendent this was for me. Trying to hold Deep Thoughts in my mind had always been so exhausting. Look at that flower. Wow. We live in a world with flow . . . Ah, fuck it. My mind gets tired so easily. But shutting it off and limiting my choices to just “Yes, thank you” helped me see from my heart, not my head. I was shocked at how easy it was. It was as natural, and repetitive, as breathing.

  There were other people at the gardens that day who seemed to be tuned into this secret, but most of the people I saw were going around like I always had, observing nature like scientists conducting a study. The garden was something to collect, or analyze, or capture. I’ve seen this kind of tree before, I’ll file that under “seen it.” This kind I haven’t. I’ll file that under “new.” This is bigger than or smaller than something I’ve seen before. This is better than or worse than something else I’ve seen before. Sitting on a bench next to a yellow rosebush, I heard a woman say to her husband, “They have this kind in Brentwood.” Like the roses were only there to trigger a memory of other roses you had seen before.

  From this place, it seemed absurd to take a picture of a flower to look at later. Click. Got it. Like hunters shooting film instead of bullets. Ram Dass would say, “Don’t just collect the experience, look at it now! Don’t half look at it now and half look at it on Facebook later! Completely surrender to the experience NOW!” You don’t need to remember the names of flowers. There is no test.

  When we look without thinking, we have a shot to get floored. When mystics teach looking at the world through your heart, I think this is what they mean. Looking at a flower and evaluating it, dissecting it in the laboratory in your brain, is reducing it to yet another thing we do to pass the time. When you can look without thinking—that is, meditating on the flower, staring at it and past it at the same time, shutting off your mind as if you are entering a trance, having thoughts, saying hello to them and letting them pass until you’re left with stillness—then you can merge with the flower. You can watch it sway in the breeze, waving to you, dancing for you, feeling its stem tingle up your spine.

  That can’t be photographed. That can’t be compared or contrasted or filed away neatly in your mind.

  Don’t review the flower. Don’t think of how to explain it to someone else. It’s not a new series on Hulu. It took me over three decades to realize you’re not supposed to think about paintings, flowers, or God, you’re supposed to merge with them. With “Yes, thank you,” I saw the potential to get more out of one flower than an entire botanical garden. It’s about a feeling, not a fact.

  Don’t consume the flower. Be consumed.

  retreat

  NO MATTER HOW OPEN MINDED I TRY TO BE, UNDERNEATH it all I’m still a comedian. Comedians will never feel at home in the clapping masses. We will always crave to be seated at the table of misfits in the back, cracking sarcastic jokes, desperately trying to find the others who are feeling the same douche chills we are so that we can band together, laugh, and get the fuck out of there.

  For this reason, I was apprehensive when Duncan invited me to go to Maui for the annual Ram Dass retreat, Open Your Heart in Paradise. I loved Ram Dass, way more than any other teacher I had ever found, but what if the other people who loved him were weirdos? And if they were, what did that say about me? I was scared, but Duncan assured me it would be great—he had been before—and Val said she would come with me, so I figured it would be okay. If it sucked, who cared? We’d still be in Hawaii.

  Maui is one of those airports they could’ve used for a set on Mad Men without changing a single thing. It’s retro, with chocolate brown walls and a faded pink carpet patterned with prints of local flowers. They make very little effort, I assume, because they know they don’t have to impress you with the airport. If you don’t like it, simply look out the window and have your breath taken away by the perfect skies, palm trees, and grass so green you can’t believe no one is golfing on it.

  As we exited the airport we found a young woman standing with a sign for the retreat, said hello, and sat waiting for the shuttle. What would the other Ram Dass fanatics look like? I wondered. Turns out, just exactly as you’d imagine. Before long, Val and I were surrounded by hippies young and old, smiley, crunchy, and kind. We just sat there with our bags, not yet ready to mingle, when a man who sort of looked like Milton from Office Space rolled his bag toward us, sat down, and greeted me by saying “Ram Ram.” “Hello,” I replied, not sure what the call-and-response situation was, suddenly very nervous as to what I had gotten us into.

  The driver was a local Hawaiian, an employee of the hotel not affiliated with the retreat, and as the shuttle quickly filled with loud conversations about yoga, and gurus, and mantras, suddenly I felt just as I had in similar van rides to airports for mission trips with my Christian church, worried that the not-with-us driver might feel awkward having to listen to us singing “Awesome God” or praying out loud for a safe and pleasant flight. I just got away from this shit, I thought. What am I doing back here?

  Val and I both put earbuds in for the hour-long ride to the resort. I considered listening to punk rock, or hip-hop, to offset the religious chill I was experiencing, but instead I listened to Ram Dass, desperately trying to remember why I had come in the first place, and my anxiety melted somewhat as I heard his familiar voice and got lost in the marvelous Hawaiian coastline.

  (Val listened to Beyoncé.)

  At the hotel, checking in felt like church, too. There was the front desk for regular tourists and beside it a separate table manned by retreat volunteers handing out welcome packets, meal tickets, and name tags for the people on our shuttle. I saw names like “Parvati” and “Raghu” hanging on the necks of people who looked more like “Susans” or “Dans.” I was just getting comfortable with Ram Dass, one white guy with a Hindu-sounding name, but now suddenly there were dozens of them. Lakshmans, Shivas, and Saraswatis were everywhere. I saw more than one full arm tattoo of Hanuman the monkey god, and Krishna, and, no shit, one of Duncan Trussell smiling up at me from some guy’s calf. Talismans and beads were everywhere, and all around us, hippies dressed like pet psychics wandered by
wearing chunky jewelry and Birkenstocks.

  At the first event—held in a large open-air meeting tent probably used most often for corporate luaus—Val and I took two seats toward the back. In the front of the room was a stage where a large picture of Maharaj-ji hung next to a few Hindu deities I couldn’t identify, and the sides of the room were lined with flags adorned with images of Buddha and Christ flapping in the island breeze.

  I was desperately keeping an eye out for Duncan but, apart from that one dude’s leg, I hadn’t spotted him yet. Val and I were keeping an open mind, but we were both worried we had somehow ended up back where we both began—inside an organized religion. Even though all of this was sort of far-out, it was also incredibly familiar and feeling very, very churchy. Val noticed that even the stories were the same—a man in the Far East found communion with God and shared it with his disciples, who were transformed by his love. “It’s a different book and different songs, but I sort of feel like we just traded Jesus for Maharaj-ji,” she said. “Maharaj-Jesus,” she joked. It felt like a vocabulary switch. Jesus to Maharaj-ji, God to Ram, “Shine Jesus Shine” for “Hare Krishna.” Memorizing the Hanuman Chalisa—a forty-verse chant in Hindi that many of the attendees seemed to know by heart—felt like showing off, like when Val and I used to memorize the books of the Bible and key verses for chocolate bars. As much as Ram Dass called this path a “pathless path,” once we were on it, it felt very much like a path.

  Fortunately, just as I was beginning to despair I saw the bright, open, real-life face of Duncan Trussell as he walked into the tent with his girlfriend. I eagerly waved him over, happy to have another comedian with whom we could share our hesitations. I sat him down, whispering conspiratorially, “What are we doing here? This feels like Burning Man. These people look like they make their own soap.”

  Duncan laughed, but he was into it. “Just wait, man,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  After sitting quietly through a traditional Hawaiian musical performance that was lovely but seemed to have nothing to do with anything, the room hushed as a young man pushed Ram Dass in his wheelchair into the room. Some people stood up. Some people clasped their hands together in the namaste prayer position, others cheered. I stayed in my seat and watched as he rolled, smiling and waving, just a few feet in front of me. This wasn’t ’60s Ram Dass, the one whom I knew so well from my iTunes library—this was Ram Dass in his eighties, poststroke Ram Dass, smiling wide, eyes shining, lighting the room up like a disco ball. I was shocked at how much it meant to see him in person, and as soon as I saw his glowing, smiling face, my hesitation began to melt away.

  Ram Dass rolled up to the stage and sat in front of a microphone. Since his stroke in 1997, his speech has been slow. Gone were the days of the fast-paced storyteller; it took him what felt like forever to say his first words. But I didn’t care—he was there. I was in the same room as the man who cracked back open the door to my spiritual heart. Just the sound of the joyful breath he exhaled before he began was enough to get me to step away from my comedian cynicism and clasp my hands in front of my chest like a child waiting to see what his Christmas gifts might be. He seemed to be radiating love like a spotlight or an oscillating sprinkler, each of us the dry grass in front of him waiting for the water to arrive.

  RD told us the story of meeting Maharaj-ji, a story I had heard a thousand times, I’m sure along with most of the people in the room, but as he spoke, slowly and with effort, it became very clear that it wasn’t about the words. Instead, it was about the space in between the words.

  The other devotees onstage had their own stories, too. Some of them had met Ram Dass in the late ’60s when he first returned from India and had heard him on his speaking tour. The people at those early talks described feeling a transmission coming from him, something behind his words, a vibration of a great love that compelled them, too, to travel to India and find Maharaj-ji.

  When they arrived, they learned that Maharaj-ji didn’t teach, at least in the way we think of teaching. He was a miracle baba, meaning he did impossible things—he read minds, healed people, appeared at two places at once—but time and time again the people who sat with him reported that it wasn’t the miracles that hooked them, it was what Ram Dass called “the ocean of love” residing inside him. People just basked in it, and it changed their hearts. From what I can gather, Maharaj-ji just sat, or lay on his side, throwing fruit to people and radiating pure, unconditional love. That love, clearly, had changed these people’s lives forever. Being in his presence seemed to instantly open people’s hearts and helped them identify with their true Being. It was like Ram Dass was the radio, and his guru was the song, coming through within and behind the words in his lectures. And once people heard this song, they were hooked.

  It reminded me of the story of Christ, how he would yell out to fishermen to follow him and, bam, they would drop their nets and go. This love, it seemed, lit the pilot lights in their own hearts, and even all these years later, the fire in these devotees was still burning bright.

  The name of this retreat had seemed so stupid, but here I was, as advertised, opening my heart in paradise. And just like that, I went from very out to very in. Ram Dass didn’t speak much more than he did the first night, but that was okay. Just him being there was enough to inspire me to try every optional activity the retreat had to offer. I went to talks given by Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. Val and I sang kirtan with the group for an hour every night. I even did yoga a few times, sweating more than you’ve ever seen a man barely moving sweat, dripping like a turkey into a pan in the oven, before I realized that maybe sitting still was more my speed.

  I had already tried meditating—not just “yes, thank you,” but actually sitting still with my eyes closed and repeating a mantra in my head for twenty minutes a day, twice a day—and while I had enjoyed it, the method I had been taught in LA had had all the spirituality steam-cleaned out of it. It had been repackaged for the West as simply a way to unwind and function with greater productivity. In Hawaii, I learned that Ram Dass saw meditation as something more than just a way of getting better sleep or more mental clarity. To him, sleep and clearer thinking were just happy byproducts of a deeper practice, a practice that could help people stop identifying with their thoughts and start identifying with the awareness that was noticing the thoughts. Ram Dass saw meditation as a technique to help us identify not as our bodies or our minds but as souls.

  But let’s hold on for a second.

  I know “soul” is a loaded word. I know a lot of you, especially the formerly religious, may shudder at that word. I’m with you. I did, too.

  The word “soul” had been used and misused far too many times, and when I heard Ram Dass say it, I, too, was dubious. “Soul” was not an idea I had been missing since I had lost my traditional faith. “Soul” had always just been part of the Christian sales pitch: “You’re not a body, you’re a soul, so you’d better believe what we believe or your soul is going to hell.” If anything, getting rid of the idea was a good thing—and by no means did it seem like a term worth circling back for. My understanding of “soul” growing up was straight out of Looney Tunes: the translucent, airy version of Wile E. Coyote that slips out of his body and goes up to heaven after he gets squashed by an anvil. My soul was just dead me. Same personality, same thoughts and desires, same weird laugh. This made sense. I mean, what was the point of going to heaven if you weren’t there to enjoy it?

  But Ram Dass was teaching something different. To him, your soul was something outside of and separate from your personality. It’s not your likes or your dislikes or your fashion sense or your love of Bulgarian food—that’s all brain stuff that dies when you die. To RD, your soul was your pure essence.

  The term he uses is “Witness.” Not the you that’s reading this right now, the you that’s watching you read this right now. The buzz in the fridge. Not the blueprint of your life, but the paper the blueprint of your life is printed on. And you can feel it with
out meditating—try singing “Happy Birthday” in your head right now. Go on, I’ll wait. Now ask yourself, “Who is hearing that?”

  That’s your Witness. Not the thinker, not the doer, but the observer. That’s your Awareness. That’s your “soul.”

  Ram Dass compared having a human body to operating a space suit. We spend our whole lives, he said, learning how to use the suit—running software like our personalities and our thoughts and our genes—that eventually we get confused and forgetful and start identifying with the suit instead of with what’s operating it.

  To me, this felt like a tremendous relief. And it felt familiar.

  It felt like baseball.

  AGAIN. I AM NOT A SPORTS FAN. EVEN AS A KID, ALL I ever wanted to do was sit and chat. I didn’t like dad stuff. I liked mom stuff! I didn’t know who was in the World Series, but I knew the appropriate amount of time to let a cup of tea steep before a good porch sit. So when my dad would ask me if I wanted to go to a ball game, I would say yes, but it was mostly in the hopes that we would gab and gossip between plays. We didn’t. It was almost exclusively a facing-forward operation. Men, I was learning, were looking for a break from talking.

  I couldn’t wait to talk to my mom about this.

  But even though I didn’t care about the game at all and spent most of my time medicating my boredom with ice cream and somewhere between three and seven hot dogs, there was always a moment I loved in baseball. It’s that moment when a player who used to play for the Red Sox would return to Fenway Park, this time as a Yankee. Being from Boston, I’d had it mansplained to me that the Yankees are pure evil, a terrible and soulless ball club that simply uses its millions to buy the best players and pay their way into championships. There was no heart to them. No Mighty Ducks. No Rudy. They were just a giant corporation, and rooting for them was like rooting for Microsoft.