Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  And it was starting to sink in. It was clear all this back and forth wasn’t actually about sex or being horny. It was about fear. It wasn’t about lust. It was about my attachment to my desires, my identification with them. It was my resistance to seeing myself as a soul. It was a fear of being separate, removed from a connection with the Divine because I was always drowning in my own humanity, forever a spectator to the Love and Oneness I had heard stories about, like I had been sent away from the party for wearing the wrong clothes. But in this moment, I realized no one had the authority to send me away. There was no doorman. I was the doorman. Hell, I was the party.

  Horniness was the teaching. It wasn’t in the way of the spiritual work, it was the spiritual work. Clearly, these two issues, sex and God, had been intertwined since I first heard about either one of them. And whatever this was, it wasn’t going to let me go until I made peace with that. I thought I was done. I thought I had become this big, powerful man with a car and a wallet and TV credits, but the Pete who cut and fixed and cut and fixed the ribbon on his brother’s VHS porn tapes, it turns out, was still in there—still pretty sure God didn’t want him, and psychoanalysis, or even understanding, wasn’t the answer.

  I had tried getting married to make sex feel okay. I had tried buying a Playboy and leaving it on my coffee table. I had tried casual sex with the help of alcohol and usually more than one pharmaceutical. The only thing I didn’t try was love. Loving my embarrassing little predicament and my predictable Christian-shame psychology. The kid in me didn’t want understanding or rationalizations or techniques or even experiences. It was so much simpler than that.

  The kid wanted love.

  THE NEXT DAY, I SAT WITH RAM DASS ONE LAST TIME and told him this entire story: The repression. The paranoia. The cloud tits. We laughed, our roles reversed, this time me telling him a funny story about finding my heart in the midst of a self-involved, fearful mess.

  The silence we shared afterward was the best part. And nothing had changed. The person, Ram Dass, knew more about me, but we were done with that. As he would say, that was all just stuff. It was just the story line. This was just lila, another good episode. And we sat there, loving what was underneath all that. Loving the simple awareness, the piece of consciousness that for both of us was just working with the foibles of being stuck in one of these ridiculous meat puppets.

  Just as my successes hadn’t impressed him the first time we met, neither did my struggles blow his hair back. He was always just there, here, beaming out the good stuff.

  I sneezed, interrupting the quiet moment, and Ram Dass looked at me and said, “God bless you.” After a beat we both laughed.

  “Hey!” I joked, “I got what I came for!”

  Just then, Dassi Ma came through the door, letting me know our time was up. We took a photo, and I went back to my room to pack.

  WHEN I WAS A KID, ME AND MY FRIENDS USED TO USE our neighbor’s pool. One of my fondest memories is of the time we were crossing the lawn in our bathing suits and it started to rain. At first, we were sad because it meant our pool day had been ruined. But then, like a revelation, it hit us: We’re in our bathing suits. It’s okay to be wet. We went from a feeling of disappointment to a feeling of pure liberation. The sun still shining, we ran and played in the rain, laughing and sliding on the wet grass.

  This memory is what my experience with Ram Dass felt like. I went in with an idea of a sunny day and a happy dip in the neighbor’s pool. And then it rained. But being with Ram Dass showed me it was okay to be with what was, to yield to the rain, to let go, and to play.

  You’re in your bathing suit. It’s okay to be wet.

  My bags zipped up and the sheets stripped off the bed, I sat one last time in front of the puja table and let my brain do its thing and try to make sense of everything that had happened. Of course, to him it all seemed a bit much. Gurus. Monkey gods. Miracles. But the big “I” didn’t care. I didn’t need him to be “in,” or as Ram Dass says, “to know and to know that he knows.” It was all so much simpler than that. Doubts and darkness and fears aside, I just surrendered, and repeated over and over, out loud—to Maharaj-ji, to Ram Dass, to myself—it didn’t matter. I just want to be love. I just want to be love. I just want to be love. I just want to be love.

  ON MY WAY TO THE AIRPORT, I TEXTED VAL THE PHOTO of me and Ram Dass. She was at home, pregnant, round like an uppercase “B,” and replied, “It looks like you’re in love.”

  That was it. We had spent some time hanging out in love.

  gateway god

  AFTER ALL THIS, I WAS LEFT WITH A VERY LIBERAL definition of God. Just like Ram Dass, I now see God simply as Awareness, the original I-Am-ness that erupted into the big bang, the this-ness that is, and behind, everything. I don’t need an image or a metaphor as much as I enjoy just tripping on the miracle of something we don’t understand looking out my eyes and listening with my ears right now.

  That’s enough. It’s simple, and general, and completely open to everyone. More than just a mystery, God ended up being the mystery of awareness. The simple phenomenon of I-Am-ness, or This—not something we have to debate so much as something we’re all participating in and can tune in to and flow with.

  The more I looked into it, the less New Age and hippie-dippie it seemed. When Moses met God as a burning bush, for example, he asked God for his name. The character of God replied, “I Am.” As a kid, I always thought this was God being cheeky, like, “None of your business.” Like, “I Am, all right. Let’s just leave it at that and no one gets hurt.” But now I saw that maybe this seemingly new idea had been staring me in the face all along, right there toward the beginning of the book I had been raised with. God is is-ness. He is consciousness. He is the part of you behind your thoughts and your personality that’s watching all of it. When two people debated the existence of God, I now saw it as two pieces of God debating how to define itself. It’s just the this in what-is-this? I love it. Finally, I had a definition that felt right and didn’t make my skin crawl.

  Occasionally, sure, my brain still has its doubts, but they don’t matter much to the bigger Me. I now see my thinking mind as an employee, and his objections or hesitations don’t rattle my deeper, inner CEO. I like to think of it like this: “Pete” isn’t enlightened, but somewhere, underneath it all, “I” am. And when I rest in that “I” place, not swept away for the millionth time by my circumstances or headaches or personal disappointments, that’s just how I feel.

  It’s truly wonderful.

  When I grew up in the church, once or twice a year one of the women in our choir would sing a song that really tore the house down called “I Am Not Ashamed.” This was an emotional song for everybody in the room. Our chins would quiver, and we’d close our eyes and put our hands in the air, really feeling it.

  But looking back, I think what made that song so overpowering to me was that I was ashamed. And I don’t think I was the only one. That’s why we had that song! You don’t have to sing “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” if you’re really not ashamed. No one has ever sang “I am not ashamed of ice cream.” There’s no need.

  But that was me. I wanted to love Christ so badly, and I did, but the Gospel he asked us to spread as it had been told to me was, frankly, shameful. I was ashamed to have to tell all my gay, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, and Muslim friends they were going to hell. I was ashamed to tell people that their grandparents and loved ones who had died who didn’t believe were in hell, right now, and there was nothing we could do about it. On one hand, I was told to tell everyone I could the Good News, to save them, and on the other, there was nothing I wanted more than to keep it to myself. And then a woman would sing a song in church and I would feel guilty, and emotional, and vow to tell my friend Claudia that she was on the fast track to eternal torture because she was a Christian but the wrong kind of Christian.

  So, through all of this, all I wanted was a container for my what-is-this? that I could be proud of, someth
ing not just called “Good News” but something that would actually be good news. And I found it. On the other side of a heartbreak, and mushrooms, and chatting with Duncan, and battling to suppress my carnal urges in Ram Dass’s guesthouse. Now when the meaning of life comes up, or Christ, or Buddha, or any of it, I’m excited. Not just to talk, but to listen and learn and share and grow. It’s my favorite thing to talk about! In fact, I would say it’s the only thing I really ever want to talk about.

  I HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF HAVING THE GREAT LARRY King on my podcast, and I couldn’t wait to hear what he thought about the mystery of existence or what might happen when we die.

  Larry told me that, like most of the people I talk to, he believed in nothing, that this is all there is. I agreed that that is, for sure, one of the options, and perhaps the most rational one, and he went on to tell me about being friends with Billy Graham, and how when he was alive he would ask him, “Do you really believe you’re going to heaven to be with Christ?” Billy would reply, no surprise, “Absolutely.” Larry said he would protest to Billy, and push back with, “Where? Where is this heaven? Where is it?” He explained to me that it made far more sense that he would just dissolve into Nothing.

  Speaking with one of the greatest interviewers in the world, I was over the moon to jump into this sandbox with him. I asked Larry, “Can I tell you my favorite Bible verse?” and quoted, “The Kingdom of Heaven shall not come by expectation, the Kingdom of Heaven is here and men do not see it,” surprised at how calmly I could quote such a controversial text without feeling awkward when I wasn’t trying to “win” anything. I didn’t want to be “right.” I wanted to see if those words might ease some of our suffering caused by both of our fears of death.

  “Where is heaven?” was a good question. But I told him that I don’t necessarily believe in a heaven somewhere else, sometime else. I believe in it here, among us, but we do not see it. It was something that we could feel and experience now and later. And just as we could ask “Where is heaven?” we can also ask “Where is Nothing?” I don’t see Nothing. I see Everything. And if you see Nothing, it’s not Nothing if you can see it. There is no empty space. Everywhere is something, even if we don’t understand what that something is. I told him I see a universe that springs up into itself over and over forever, pulsing and recycling and repurposing every piece of itself. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I didn’t convince him, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, in that moment I had gotten where I wanted to go. There I was, talking about God, even quoting the Bible, hitting the ball back and forth with a great mind. It wasn’t awkward, or gross. It was joyful, and fun. And for the first time:

  I wasn’t fucking ashamed.

  HERE’S THE BEST PART: I FOUND MY WAY, BUT I HONESTLY don’t care which symbol or tradition or story or metaphor does it for you or for Larry King. It could be the sheer awe you feel looking at satellite photos of the earth. It could be believing the Bible literally or as a metaphor.

  For me, the first one was the love of my family. Then a simple wonder of what-is-this? Then Jesus. Then a beautiful Nothing. Then Ram Dass, then Maharaj-ji, then Maharaj-ji sort of mixed with Jesus and Buddha and all the rest, like a weird smoothie. But these are just words. The real fun is how these words move you. It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing, it’s about an inner transformation, not your ability to articulate that transformation at a cocktail party or in a televised debate.

  None of us knows exactly what’s going on here. And that’s okay. Stories and myths and meditation and contemplation and psychedelics are the best tools I’ve found to start to even touch the infinite, fundamental nature of Reality residing inside ourselves. It doesn’t matter which words or methods you choose to get there. What matters is that you get there.

  I by no means think I have this figured out. I still walk around with a deep and wide what-is-this?—I’ve just developed a worldview that makes a space for it. I take comfort in redefining God in the ways I have in this book, but just like all metaphors, the man with the beard in the sky on up, my image of God is and will always be incomplete.

  It’s not about having the answer. Any take on the divine, in my opinion, should be viewed as what it is: a Gateway God. It’s just your metaphor, or your guru, or your method or philosophy. And it works for you now, but these things may come and go, morphing and shifting as you morph and shift. The way you choose to articulate it today is by no means the final word, it’s just one of the steps along the way. I may not agree with myself in three years. And that’s okay. It’s all in the game. And there are no mistakes.

  Just as I can look back on my first marriage with fondness and compassion, I now see the God I was raised with, the Throned Sky God, as something not right or wrong, but something important, something vital, that planted a kernel of interest in me to go deeper later. The Burger King king was simply my first understanding of the un-understandable. And in a way, he’s no different from the others. They’re all Gateway Gods. They’re all fingers pointing at the moon, none of them are the moon itself. The moon is too huge to house within our brains. But Gateway Gods are great! They’re bookmarks saving your place in case you ever decide to move forward or backward or sideways or close the book altogether. They’ll be there, giving you a reference point to help you make sense of where you end up, ready to welcome you back if you lose your footing, or equally happy to wish you a fond farewell. They’re just making it safe for you to take a closer look. And they’re made for shedding.

  “When a chicken comes out of the eggshell,” the Zen philosopher Alan Watts said, “the eggshell is not something to be deplored. It’s certainly something to be broken, but had the shell not existed the chicken wouldn’t have been protected. So, in precisely the same way, images, religious ideas, religious symbols exist in order to be constructively and lovingly broken.”

  I’m grateful the church gave me a safe place in which to grow and play and laid a foundation for what would later become a deeply satisfying spiritual path. It took me from one place to the next. It was the third grade.

  I got into religion for certainty, to have a set of ideals and beliefs that I could carry around in my head and know, and know that I knew, so I could be in God’s club. If there’s one thing I would tell myself at the peak of my traditional faith—the Pete who went to Christian college, the Pete who was planning on being a youth pastor, the Pete who went on mission trips and led worship and knew the chords to “As the Deer” by heart—it’s this:

  It’s not about certainty.

  Losing things, changing how and what you believe, is all part of it.

  It was the plan all along.

  It’s not about how long you can hold on to the first hot potato you were handed, the faithful being let into heaven with their burned hands, smelling like french fries: “Well done, good and faithful potato holder.” This isn’t an endurance test to see if you can maintain the faith you inherited as a child. It’s messy, and it’s supposed to be messy. It’s mysterious, because it’s a mystery. I once saw losing my faith as the worst thing I could possibly do, the one thing I was told never to do, and now I see it as an essential step to my developing a three-dimensional, vibrant, living faith.

  I think this is what Christ meant when he said you have to lose your life to find it. I had to lose my faith to find it. You can’t just sign for someone else’s God delivery. You can’t just worship others’ spiritual experience—their rapture, their truth, their conversion—you need to find your own. And to do that, you need to get your hands dirty.

  Faith isn’t certainty, it’s adventure, something you’re going to come back from dusty and bruised, having seen and done things you never would have even considered before.

  Your doubt is welcome on this journey, as is your disbelief. You’re going to meet so many different approaches to God—enjoy them all. Collect as many stamps in your passport as you can.

  It’s like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey:

  You’re in the villa
ge, and it’s nice.

  Safe, familiar, comfortable.

  It’s chicken night, and you love chicken.

  But you feel a call to go to the woods.

  You’ve been told your entire life not to go in the woods.

  But you’re compelled. And you leave. On chicken night.

  And it’s not nice.

  It’s unsafe, unfamiliar, uncomfortable.

  And you’re cold. And hungry. And lost.

  But you get strong. And kill your own chickens. And learn your own way.

  You meet others, people who’ve never even heard of your village, and you learn.

  You slay dragons, get wounds, find swords, and heal.

  You find out what you’re made of.

  And realize what you were looking for was a part of you all along.

  But the story doesn’t end there. The final step in every hero’s journey is to come back. You return to the village, the same but different. And the village is the same, but you see it differently. And you tell everyone what you learned in those forbidden woods, around the fire, adding spices to their chicken they’ve never dreamed of, telling the story of the time you did the one thing you were told never to do.

  Now, God isn’t something I believe in—it’s something I feel all of us soaking in.

  luminous emptiness

  IN THE FALL OF 2018, AFTER A FIFTY-HOUR LABOR AT home with absolutely no sleep and waves of pain for Valerie every ninety seconds that I can’t even begin to imagine, she and I drove to the hospital, where she promptly got an epidural and gave birth to our first baby girl eight hours later.

  Val was a champion. We stayed present, and together, and friends throughout. “I hate to see you in pain,” I said to her in between contractions, “but I’m having a great time.” She agreed—we were doing something real. We were right there and had nowhere else to go. It was the opposite of looking at screens or double-tapping photos of our friend’s dinners. It felt ancient and powerful.