The Alcove: Chapter 2

Chapter Two

School started that next day and like good humble students Paige and I trotted off to our respective classes - I my philosophy, playing with words and developing great systems and Paige her religious studies, playing with spirits and essences and deep pious angel hearts.  And school can really be a spiritual type of cleansing provided you look at it from a humble, awe inspired point of view and that's why it didn't cause me spiritual pain to use that blessed alcove as a quiet place to rest my head and read my Descartes.  Aside from soft bouts of meditative zazen, that alcove became in addition a center for intellectual reflections and inquiries.  And it wasn't long before our philosophical, religious friends knew all about it and wanted to crawl inside the famous tunnel.  

I was off in my room, talking to my parents by telephone when I heard Sam's voice downstairs.  He was down there with Paige saying hi and all that.  I said goodbye to my parents and trotted down the stairs.  When I reached the bottom I saw Paige and no sign whatsoever of Sam.

"Isn't Sam here?" I asked.

Paige grinned and pointed downward to the alcove door, closed and quiet.  I laughed.

Sam's a kick back, tall, long faced Bikkhu, excited and fascinated on his search for samati flashes of enlightenment, perhaps quite sudden.

"What could that be like? And what is enlightenment?  What does so and so think about it?  And did you read this or that book?  And damn it's cold in here!," Sam would cry.  He was always cold and one day Paige was developing crazy ramblings about people's heads shrinking as the temperature dropped and if this were true Sam would be constantly in a state of embarrassment because his head would consistently be the size of some shrunken head tribe size in the middle of a wet rain forest.  How unfortunate that would be!

Paige and I waited outside the alcove for Sam to return to the real world, expecting him to be a mere one-two minutes (in fact, surprised that he crawled directly in that hole and actually closed the door) and we were brewing up some tea.

That tea was stark cold by the time Sam finished his meditative practice (or whatever he was doing - perhaps napping).  He crawled out with his long sad face and said “I wonder what fung shui says about triangular structures” being that the roof of that alcove slanted down like an Egyptian pyramid. 

Sam was always asking interesting questions like this.  He was always asking questions.  He had such a wonder and awe at the world that is so refreshing to find among fellow students.  So often a student will spend one semester, about three hours a week for fifteen or sixteen weeks and come out thinking they know all about sociology or biology or art history when in fact they know just a minuscule fraction of a universe-size pie.  I’d certainly been guilty of it.  I once took an introductory course to modern philosophy and walked out thinking I fully understood Spinoza when I had only read secondary sources and never even cracked open a book written by Spinoza’s hand!  And then that’s, of course, been translated and messed with and developed into our English animal that may not fully reflect Spinoza because words do change things!  And then we’re still not in his shoes, seeing things from his angle, from his time period, period.  Someone could spend all of grad school and become a so-called master of Spinoza and still not fully understand a thing about the man.  You can’t get into his head!  Sure enough, Spinoza scholars all disagree and argue about what the man meant.  

And I think about Henry David Thoreau and he said you should spend as much time with a book as the author spent making it.  And then it becomes a seemingly life-long meditation to fully digest something.  And there are enough books in your average book store to get lost swimming in all kinds of words and pages and you think there are enough books in the world to throw the world out of orbit simply by the sheer weight of them! 

Sam understood that and, like a great Bodhisattva, constantly asked questions, reaffirming his beginner’s mind and instilling it in all the proud minds that approached him.