| He looked at me like, “What is this guy talking about?” But he was a polite man, and he figured I’d spent maybe an hour and a half with him and I’d really listened to him. As he told me later, he thought, “You’re an intelligent man and maybe you know what you’re talking about.” He figured he didn’t have much to lose. So he bought his copy of Lao Tzu and I saw him about a week later.
You wrote that when he walked in that day, he seemed an altogether different person.
Yes, he was a totally different man. The way he walked, he was walking with a kind of easy glide. He was a black man, and to me he had seemed like the archetypal, ultra-disciplined master sergeant. And now he’s this relaxed, easy-moving guy. And I said, “What’s going on?” He said, basically, “I went home, I had some time off, and I started reading this book that you assigned me. And it seemed pretty strange to me, with those poems about conquering by submitting and gaining by letting go.” He said, “All those contradictions seemed pretty strange to me. But I figured I had nothing else to do, with a long three-day weekend off, so I just started reading. Then I read it again and I started to get interested in all these contradictions. And the more I read it, the more I was reminded of what it says in the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus talks about the lilies of the field. About how they don’t toil and they don’t sow, yet they’re more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. And where he talks about the meek inheriting the earth.” Milton said that these contradictions in the Tao Te Ching were very much like the contradictions that he had read in the Bible.
He got really interested, and he began to breathe with these verses. He said it was like “the verses were coming into my body, like some wonderful food or some precious aroma, and I could feel myself changing, I could feel myself relaxing with it. So it wasn’t like I could understand them consciously, but I could feel them working on me.” He continued, saying that, “Then I went for a long walk, and these verses kept going through my mind and I began to see some of the foolishness of my trying to make things happen that couldn’t happen, the old grudges. Whether it’s grudges against my boss, or against my wife. And I just got so angry and then I started to cry. This was on Saturday night, the second day. Because I saw how futile it was to try to change things that couldn’t be changed and how much harm I was doing by the way I was talking to my son. The way I was making fun of him and resentful of him. I was so rigid and so mean to him. I started to cry, and then after I cried I found myself laughing at myself because I just saw how ridiculous it was, what I was doing.”
It sounds like you picked the right book for him to read.
He kept reading, two or three more translations. He could feel the change working in him. And that Sunday night, he told me, he called his ex-wife’s house in California, and said, “How’re you doing?” And his wife, who was shocked at his change in tone, said, “What have you been smoking?” And Milton said, “I haven’t been smoking anything, I’ve just been reading a book and breathing and going for walks.” And she couldn’t believe it, because he had been so mean to her. He was being like a normal person again. And then he talked to his son, and said that for the first time in a couple of years, “it wasn’t as though I said anything different, it’s just the way I was talking and the way I was listening to him. I was really hearing what he had to say, and I was interested in what he was doing in school and watching on TV, and his baseball and other sports.”
He said he got off the phone, moved to tears. We were coming to the end of our session, and he said, “Doc, thank you very much. Between you and me and Lao Tzu, I think I’m just about cured. I don’t feel depressed, I don’t feel angry, I just feel good. And if I ever need you, I’ll be in touch again.” I said, “Great! Thank you.”
It’s as though he wasn’t able to solve the contradictions at his previous level of awareness, and this experience of reading the Tao Te Ching forced him to either shut down entirely or else reach to a higher level. It’s like that old saying I’ve heard attributed to Albert Einstein, that you can’t solve a problem on the level at which it was created.
I think that’s probably what happened. I think another way to look at it is that it just broke him open, that he just “got it.” It’s like they cut through this rigid, stuck structure of behavior and movement, feeling and thought, and he just opened up. |
