by Pete Holmes
So you’d expect that when a player like, say, Johnny Damon—I had to google that—who used to play for Boston then left to play for New York, would return to Boston but this time wearing the pinstripes of our sworn enemy, every single Red Sox fan would stand, boo, and say “fuck you” the way only Bostonians can—with a hard “h” sound in the middle of the word “fuck.” FHACK YOU!
But that’s not what they do. They don’t boo. They cheer. Thirty thousand sports fans, from Boston, deeply invested in the game of baseball—often to the point of tears and fistfights—transcend the moment and see beyond the roles being played. Even as a kid, sleepy from dairy and encased meats, I could feel that it was amazing. It was like a temporary mass awakening:
He may be wearing the clothes of our rival.
But that’s not who he is.
He used to pretend to be one of us.
Now he’s pretending to be one of them.
Because Johnny isn’t a Red Sock or a Yankee any more than a ladybug is Italian. He’s Johnny, playing a game. There’s a feeling in the air when that many people see beyond what’s in front of them, like the stories you hear of World War I soldiers from both sides laying down their arms on Christmas to play soccer in the no-man’s-land. That special way of seeing that’s so natural but also so easily forgotten: It’s just a uniform.
Ram Dass took this idea out of the ballpark. This packaging we find ourselves in—our bodies—it’s just a uniform. You’re not a Jew—you are Awareness in Jewish packaging. I’m not a tall, soft, Lithuanian, I’m Awareness in tall, soft, Lithuanian packaging.
Ram Dass expanded my what-is-this? to include a very big who-is-this? I never really understood the significance of this question before him. My whole life, when people would say “The most important question you can ask is ‘Who am I?’” I always took the question as an invitation to excavate your personality. Don’t leave anything behind! Find out if you like sushi! Or hiking! Or bubble tea ice cream! Through all of my twenties and early thirties, if someone had commanded me to “know thyself,” I would’ve replied, “I do! I am Pete. I am a soft, right-handed comedian from Lexington, Massachusetts, who likes peanut butter, the first two Christopher Nolan Batman movies and, despite social pressures, doesn’t really care for the Beatles. I’m sorry. It just sounds like kid’s music to me.” That’s how I thought you answered the biggest question of life—just really digging in and laying out your preferences and your dislikes for all to see. As if after you did that, you’d look back on your life as an old man, satisfied, and say, “Everyone knew how I took my coffee.”
But I was learning that perhaps the better way to ask this question would be, “Who are you, really?” What is consciousness? And in this world of rapidly vibrating energy we call matter, what does Awareness derive from? How do these molecules stuck in the shape of a human know that they are molecules stuck in the shape of a human?
In other words, what is looking out your eyes right now? That’s Awareness. And when all the great spiritual teachers say you have to die to your little self and awaken to your big Self, that’s what they mean. In fact, that’s how I would summarize all of spirituality: you are not your thoughts, you are not your personality, you are the elemental, pure, eternal consciousness residing behind those thoughts. Lay down your ego, stop collecting meaningless shit, wake up, and rest in that Awareness. It’s who you really are.
And it’s your only real shot at feeling peace.
i cast all my cares
I DON’T DRINK COFFEE, I RUN ON ANXIETY.
I have my entire life. In high school, not only did I have a bald spot on the side of my head from stress, but I had digestion problems so bad my friends could tell I was worried about something by my farts. If the feeling was an image, it would be a chain dragging behind a truck on the freeway, blue sparks shooting off it as it thrashes from side to side. If the feeling was a sound, it would be a Dave Matthews Band jam session: Too many solos. Too many instruments. Too many cymbals on that drum kit.
My brain finds stuff to worry about. So, in church, whenever the pastor preached about peace or rest or the Lord being your shepherd—making you lie down in green pastures, leading you beside still waters—my head, and my stress-induced bald spot, perked up. I wanted the Lord to be my shepherd so bad. I didn’t want to be a nervous boy, I wanted to be a happy sheep. Bending my little sheep legs, chewing grass, laying down for the third nap of the day. My wool feeling like a fancy pillow you get your dad at Brookstone for Father’s Day but surrounding me in every direction. Jesus watching, smiling in the sun, His wooden staff the shape of a candy cane, keeping the wolves away. I loved that verse. I just had no idea how to make this shepherd/sheep arrangement a reality.
I remember being fifteen, lying awake in bed, too old for stuffed animals but surrounded by Tiggers and Garfields and a huge white cat pillow my grandma had made for me that, yes, I would bring with me to college, feeling deep, generalized anxiety. If the feeling was a question, it would be “What if they get me?” It didn’t matter who the they was, or if there even was a they. My brain was just misfiring. Shooting off the chemicals usually reserved for something pointy chasing you. So, I prayed the prayer I prayed every night from ages five to fifteen.
Dear Jesus
Thank you for this day
Bless Mommy, Daddy, Petey, Sammy
John, Penny, and the kittens . . .
That was the intro, the same every time, and then I would just freestyle. So that night, I asked for help calming down. (Oh, in case you didn’t notice, I did ask Jesus to bless myself, as well as my long dead cat, Sammy, before my brother, John, then closed it out with Penny and the kittens, four more dead cats. My mom had heard me pray this prayer dozens of times out loud, and yet neither of us thought this was weird.)
But it didn’t work. My prayer was just more noise in my head. Just more thoughts. Another fiddle in the jam band, lost in the commotion. So I would try someone else’s thoughts. I sang a song in my head that I learned in church. It went like this:
I cast all my cares upon You
I lay all my burdens down at Your feet
And anytime I don’t know what to do
I will cast all my cares upon You
It’s a lovely song. Our pastor used to sing it a cappella from the pulpit and it gave me chills. It also gave me hope. Next time, I’ll try this.
The only problem was, it didn’t work. Which was horrible for two reasons. One, I really needed it to work. Chains clanging. Two saxophones. And two, I felt it was my lack of faith that was making it not work. So, it was my fault. Someone who believed harder would be asleep by now. This created more anxiety. I was really waiting for the magic to kick in. I was really trying. If you loved God more, this would work. If you meant it more, this would work.
So, I’d sing it again. Out loud this time. And as I sang, I pictured myself putting whatever it was that I was worried about into a suitcase and leaving it at the foot of the Burger King king’s throne. Up there on the clouds. Kneeling. God’s feet big, like the beginning of Monty Python.
I lay all my burdens down at Your feet.
Here I go! They’re in this suitcase! There’s your feet!
You can have them!
Okay!
I’m walking away now! Without the suitcase!
Thanks byeeeee!
But when I opened my eyes, it was all still there. And I felt terrible for it.
Decades later, I found the words of Ram Dass welcome and long overdue: “Go back inside yourself,” he said. “And you sit down so that the trauma of your ego story quiets down just a little bit. And then you begin to feel the Awareness, the presence of soul. You begin to appreciate how Awareness is Awareness. It’s not your Awareness. It’s not my Awareness. It’s nothing personal. And when you and I rest in Awareness, that is the culmination of love. Because you’re not even a breath apart. When people say, ‘May peace be with you,’ peace cannot be with the ego, except for like the briefest second.
Because the ego is made up of stuff that doesn’t allow for it. The soul is still moving toward something.
“Awareness is peace. It’s peace.”
I’m a pretty great person as long as every single one of my needs is being met, but this idea shifted my understanding of prayer from that of a wish list of requests for God to a technique that allows me to sit back into my soul—the part of me that’s less involved in getting my way but quieter, more grateful, and at peace regardless of what is happening.
This is when I started seeing prayer as a way to help me connect with the part of myself that isn’t a great person or a grumpy person, or a person who’s worried about where the bathrooms are at a concert, or his blood sugar at the beginning of a road trip, or someone who really needs a nap. Prayer now helps me connect with the part of me that’s noticing the greatness or the grumpiness, or the worry, or the blood sugar, or the fatigue. The Witness. That’s where I found the green pastures. That’s where I found the still waters. And it wasn’t something I sat in bed and asked for. I didn’t try, or believe, or think. At the retreat, I learned a simple technique. And it’s not something you need to spend hundreds of dollars taking some three-weekend course to learn:
Sit with a straight spine and focus on your breath.
Thoughts will come and go, notice them without attachment or judgment.
Try not to expect anything.
Don’t compare, don’t anticipate.
Just point your attention to how it feels to breathe.
If you don’t know how to point your attention, check right now and see if you have to pee. Go ahead. Check if you have to pee. Okay. Did you do it? What was that? Most of the time, our Awareness is in our head, behind our eyes. But when we check if we have to pee, we send a little piece of it on a reconnaissance mission, down to our bladders, where it’s like, “Thirty percent,” and then climbs back up to the group. It’s like a flashlight you can send searching all over your brain and body.
But Ram Dass asks, when does the light shine on itself?
The same way you send your focus to your bladder, send it to the sensation in your nose as it breathes in and out. Slow, fast, deep, shallow, it doesn’t matter. Just breathe. Don’t resist any feeling or thought.
This isn’t working.
Back to the breath.
This is stupid.
Back to the breath.
My butt hurts.
Back to the breath.
What if they get me?
Back to the breath.
There. I just saved you $1,100 and six hours with a kooky instructor with an amber necklace in Santa Barbara.
I wished I had known this back with my stuffed animals and my anxiety farts, singing out loud, alone in my bedroom, waiting for something to happen. Ram Dass changed everything. Before meditation, I used to ask for peace. Now I had the tools to go in and get the motherfucker.
missing the guy, again
DESPITE HOW GREAT THE RETREAT WAS, AROUND DAY three I got really depressed.
It was Maharaj-ji. Or, rather, the lack of Maharaj-ji.
For all the be-here-now, a lot of folks at the retreat sure did spend a bunch of time reminiscing about the man who touched Ram Dass’s heart. The speakers shared their Maharaj-ji stories onstage, Ram Dass retold his, people at the lunch swapped the ones they had heard, and the consensus was the same: everyone who was fortunate enough to get to sit at Maharaj-ji’s feet in the ’70s immediately experienced a transformative love and an opening of the heart that was utterly life changing. That’s how these people saw themselves as souls—they had the privilege of spending time with a real-life, impervious-to-acid guru who really, undeniably, and fundamentally saw each of them not as people but as Living Spirit. And now, all these years later, people like me were still spending a lot of money to come to a resort just to hear the stories of their transformation—people like me, who had missed out on the real thing.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maharaj-ji was the missing ingredient in my own personal transformation, so I stopped going to the talks and to yoga. Once again, I felt like I had in Chicago when all the great older improvisers told me that I had just missed studying with the great Del Close. But Maharaj-ji wasn’t teaching fucking improv, he was teaching the motherfucking secrets of the universe. I didn’t know if I even believed in gurus, disembodied or not, but I wanted to meet the person who had made so many other people who didn’t believe in gurus believe in gurus. Had I been born forty years earlier, I could’ve experienced this mountain of love and emptiness and joy that spawned a revolution and a tropical retreat with lanyards and massage packages and little meal tickets. These old hippies had met the Guy, but the Guy was dead now, and all that was left was stories about the Guy. Fuck that! I wanted to meet the Guy!
I TOOK A BREAK FROM SELF-LOATHING LONG ENOUGH to sit with Val and Duncan and drown my existential sorrows in fruity sweet mai tais. Duncan tried to comfort me, offering, “We have Ram Dass. He’s transmitting the love of Maharaj-ji. Can’t you feel it?”
“Everyone is telling me that you don’t have to meet Maharaj-ji to have him change your life,” I said, “but if he walked in right now everyone would be pretty fucking excited.”
Duncan laughed, and agreed, but he seemed to think that in the spiritual sense neither of us had missed the boat. We could still commune with him even though he had “left the body.” This was all too much for me—I knew in my heart that listening to the Rolling Stones leaning on your car in the parking lot of a stadium wasn’t the same as actually having tickets to the show, and there was no convincing me otherwise.
At that moment, Duncan’s face lit up and his eyes gestured for me to turn around. At the table behind us, Ram Dass and his personal aide, Dassi Ma, were eating lunch. We had seen him onstage, sure, but this was rare. This was free-range Ram Dass, loose in the wild.
“Oh my God,” I said. “What do we do?”
Duncan, possibly feeling his mai tais, answered quickly. “Let’s send him a drink!”
We all laughed at the idea of sending an eighty-five-year-old man recovering from a stroke in a wheelchair an alcoholic beverage, but before I could protest, Duncan had already waved over the waiter.
“We’d like to send that man a mai tai,” Duncan said, giggling.
“Duncan!” I whispered. “We can’t!”
“Why not?” he replied. “He’s done so much for us, it’s the least we can do!”
Maybe the mai tais were getting to me, too, because Duncan seemed to be making a whole lot of sense. As the drink arrived at his table I lowered my head, and so did Val, but Duncan doubled down, raising his glass to Ram Dass and, to the shock of us all, managing to squeak out the word “Cheers.”
Cheers.
What are we doing? I thought. We have no idea what kind of medication this man is on! Abort!
Ram Dass slowly put down his fork and picked up the drink, shaky in his one good hand, and took a sip. He smiled, turned to Duncan, and nodded thank you. We exploded with laughter, equal parts joy and relief, and applauded, then raised our drinks to him just as Dassi Ma started making her way back toward his table. We stifled our laughter as she picked up the drink, gave us a suspicious look, and took it away.
“Let’s go over and say hi,” Duncan said. I wasn’t sure. You’re supposed to keep your distance at the retreat—no one tells you that, but it’s sort of unspoken, like ignoring Seal if he’s in your aisle at Whole Foods. Sending a drink was one thing, but we didn’t want to pester the man any further. But before I could think too much about it, the three of us were standing at his table.
Ram Dass, no surprise, looked happy and loving. Duncan introduced me and I extended my hand, not sure what else to do. I mean, do you bow? Prayer pose? Did I dare steal the Office Space guy’s greeting and throw out a “Ram Ram”? My heart was beating out of my chest. Then, before I could overthink it any longer, Ram Dass took my hand and, instead of shaking it, brought it to his face the way you would a towel in
Bed Bath & Beyond to test its softness. As Duncan spoke for both of us, I was overwhelmed at how tender and loving RD was being toward us, especially since he and I had never met before. But he was seeing past my uniform. He continued rubbing my hand with his cheek like a friendly cat, and my heart just glowed. I didn’t know what to say. It really felt like he was greeting me as a fellow soul, not a personality, or a comedian, or a somewhat famous person who had a show on premium cable. He had no idea who I was, and here he was, offering a level of tenderness usually reserved for grandparents holding their first grandchild. It was beautiful.
We sat down, and I watched him as he ate, slowly, as he does most things, and very mindfully. I was so nervous that I began spouting off all the things I had ever thought to tell him if I ever got to meet him. “I’m from Boston,” I said. As soon as I said it, it seemed silly. There was no need to seduce him, I could already feel the love coming from his clear eyes, but I didn’t know what else to do. “I have a TV show,” I said, feeling like a kid telling a grown-up how many pennies he had. “Sometimes I work in ideas I got from you into the show. There’s a character named Leif who quotes you all the time.” He nodded, but again, this seemed irrelevant. I had spent so much of my life trying to become somebody special, and here I was, sitting with someone who had spent his life trying to become nobody special. It didn’t matter—he met me at a ten. So I just gave up and enjoyed the silence, sitting like a schoolgirl with a crush, leaning my face into my hand, just staring at him, before giving him the best compliment I could think to give.
“Ram Dass,” I said. “You’re my favorite comedian.”
Then I got up, said thank you, and went to the beach.
hot air balloon
VALERIE AND I GOT ENGAGED ON A HOT AIR BALLOON because I’m not fucking around.
