"When you find yourself practicing these three things you know you are on the right track," he says. "I am not saying that you can hold out any three ideals and call them the Truth, but service, humility, and gratitude are good benchmarks for spiritual progress."

The swirling in my head of these three principles is intensified by the fact that I live and work in the Self Knowledge Symposium community among people who also have these ideals stuck in their minds and notice them when they see them. The fact that I know the people who surround me are consciously or unconsciously on the look out for acts of service, humility, and gratitude adds a whole other layer to my thinking: if I remember to write a thank you note, am I only doing it because there is a good chance someone else will notice and praise me? Am I staying up late the night before the review board meeting to read the forty-second Symposium submission to serve the community or to glare indignantly at anyone who does not do the same… or maybe both? If I take my lunch break to run an errand for a friend, am I really doing it with the I hope that my action will be made an example in a future SKS meeting?

Every once in a while this stream of questions surrounding the true meaning of service, humility, and gratitude is broken by another thought: Damn. He did it again. In the midst of life's day-to-day scramble, he performed one of those simple acts that is truly humble, a service beyond the second guessing of a hyper-intellect.

It happened again just the other day. I came downstairs for our habitual morning meditation session to find my roommate Eric sitting motionlessly on his usual perch atop a small wooden meditation bench wrapped in a small green cotton blanket. With his chiseled, Scandinavian chin protruding, his stern gaze was unmoved by my slightly tardy entry. I quietly took my seat on an old couch pillow on the floor next to this 6' 5" giant.

Twenty-five minutes later the we began the hectic workday motions. As I shuffled around the kitchen to prepare for the day, I casually took stock of myself in the privacy of my own head and was frankly quite impressed. At age 24, I maintain this daily morning meditation practice as a mere footnote to the 60 hours a week I spend selling software over the phone at a young, fast-paced high-tech company and the other 40 hours a week I spend doing anything and everything to build the Self Knowledge Symposium community. On top of that, at a recent library warming party my housemate and I hosted, we opened our home and hearts to the rest of the SKS community to join us in our morning meditation. Just as I was adding this up to determine what level of sainthood I had attained, my eye caught something that brought my thoughts of greatness to a halt. The front door was unlocked and opened a crack, even though I had shut and locked the door the previous night. I knew immediately what had happened: every morning since we had extended the invitation for others to join us in our morning meditation, Eric had quietly unlocked and cracked our front door on the off chance that a guest might appear during our sitting. Even though two full weeks had passed without a hint of a visitor, he still remembered, at 6:15 in the morning, to fulfill our promise and open the door. Of course this was in addition to the fact that he maintains this daily morning meditation practice as a mere footnote to the 60 hours a week he spends selling software over the phone at a young, fast-paced high-tech company and the other 40 hours a week he spends doing anything and everything to build the Self Knowledge Symposium community.

Once again, I am the second place saint.

I could try to protect my first place status (or at least go for a tie) by dismissing Eric as a do-gooder, a self-righteous moralist, or a fundamentalist fanatic. However, this does not work because I live and work with Eric; I know him. Eric is not continually full of plastic good cheer like Dale, the company mailman. He does not keep a copy of Random Acts of Kindness in his glove compartment. At the end of a long day of work, Eric is apt to mumble in his dark, dry wit, "I am going to go home and hang myself." He is more likely to end his day with eight sets of squats at the gym than by counting the pieces of trash he picked up at the park. The most convincing proof of Eric's seriousness is that he has been working for the SKS for over eight years. As I have come to learn, this is more than enough time to flush out any sentimental ideas of what "being good" is.

Eric's motivations are best captured in the story August Turak wrote in the last issue of The Symposium about Brother John. Brother John was the 70 year old monk who stood outside the monastery cafeteria in the cold and rain with an umbrella, just in case any of the departing guests forgot their own.

"He loves God so much he doesn't know what to do with himself," Turak wrote of this umbrella-holding monk. "He loves God so much he doesn't know what to do with himself. All he can think to do is stand outside in the December rain with an umbrella offering his fellow pilgrims a little protection from the elements—some protection and human comfort on our long journey home."

That's why the front door of my house is cracked open at 6:15 every morning: Eric doesn't know what to do with himself.

The best submissions to The Symposium have this same sense of being written by people who don't know what to do with themselves. Alan Watts writes in This Is It, "I am neither a preacher nor a reformer, for I like to write and talk about this way of seeing things as one sings in the bath tub or splashes in the sea." Writing Symposium stories is like singing in the bathtub or performing music as described in Doug Friedlander's Ode to Aversano—writing for the sake of writing, because there is nothing else to do.


Growing Pains (top)
Kenny Felder


When I take three-year-old Benjamin to his third haircut, we are both a bit nervous. Will he start screaming and throwing a fit, as he did last time? I stand right next to him while the woman sprays his head with water, and then slowly begins to cut his bangs off. He isn't sure what to make of it all, and I keep waiting for the explosion. And then he relaxes into it. He looks up into the giant wall-sized mirror, seeing himself and the barber and me, and he begins to smile. "Daddy, I'm starting to get pretty cute!"

That haircut was about three weeks ago, and I have told the story about two thousand times since then. Everyone who hears it laughs. Everyone can see that it is funny. But there are a few people, mostly parents themselves, who see the other side of the story. Those people intuitively understand how I caught my breath and stared at Benjamin for a few silent seconds, stared as if I were seeing him for the first time, stared as if I wanted to memorize every detail of his face. At moments like these, the love fills me so much I cannot speak, I can hardly move, my whole body numbed by the intensity of my emotion.

I am not the sort of person who is normally stricken with paralyzing emotions. My best friend in college compared me to Mr. Spock. And that's what my friends thought! I always knew they were wrong. I loved singing in harmony, I hated going to Hebrew school, and, most of all, I got powerful crushes on girls, which led to extreme emotional highs and extreme emotional lows. That was as powerful as it got—I figured I had pretty much encompassed the broad range of human experience. Who could possibly feel anything more intense than that?

Mary, the oldest child in our family at five years old, impresses every adult she meets with her grammar and vocabulary. "She's so articulate! Can you imagine that she's only five years old? She sounds so adult!" But in private, perhaps to compete with her two younger brothers, she often lapses into very deliberate baby talk. Usually it is still understandable, just cute or dramatic. But suddenly, one day, she starts shouting "Nummy nummy! Nummy nummy!" I have no idea what to make of it. Is the baby hungry? She shakes her head no. "Nummy nummy!" Does the baby want to nap? "Nummy nummy! Nummy nummy!"

Finally I give up. "Mary, I have no idea what that means. What are you saying?"

"I'm speaking in my own new language that I made up. Nummy nummy means 'I love you, Daddy.'"

And I thought a college crush felt intense?

In my ten years of active spiritual seeking, I have run over and over into the same obstacles. Augie Turak teaches that spiritual work doesn't consist of "growing" in the sense of adding new parts to yourself that weren't there. Instead, you have to find the parts of yourself that are already there, but are hidden from yourself. We use our minds, our egos, and even our personalities as shields to hide the inner parts that we don't want to see.

Augie tells me that I "turn everything into 1s and 0s"—I treat myself and life as a computer algorithm, using my intellect to keep down the seething lava of emotions. Anger held down by fear, fear covered over by the façade of calm. And if I reject the parts that I deem "negative" such as anger and fear, I also hide myself from the possibility of real love, joy, compassion, and happiness. I need to allow myself to experience and express it all, to determine once and for all that knowing who I really am is more important than pretending to be something else. Otherwise I am doomed to be forever a pale shadow of what I could be—of what, paradoxically, I already am.

Jack is the baby, only 16 months old. He is just learning to walk, and he cannot talk at all. But he has reached the point where he definitely knows what he wants. He points into the playroom and screams and cries. "Jack, do you want to play on the couch?" No response, he just screams and cries. "Jack, do you want me to walk you?" I'm already walking him, stroking him, hugging him. He continues to scream and cry. "Jack, do you want a jacket? Do you want me to put you down? Do you want me to put on some music? Do your teeth hurt?" The screaming gets louder and louder. My wife, Joyce, keeps assuring me that Jack understands what I'm saying even if he can't speak himself, but sometimes it's very hard to believe. What else can I do? "Jack, do you want me to get the ball and play catch with you?"

The screaming stops like a water faucet that's been turned off. His whole face lights up with a broad smile that makes even the tears, which are still on his cheeks, look happy. He nods his head up and down frantically and says his only word: "Uh-huh." He says it over and over.

How can I explain to anyone what it feels like to be a father?


Inheritance (top)
Georg Buehler


You never said a word to us about
the secret flaw, except a hurried note,
a postscript to your will. "Now," you wrote,
"About that family curse . . . " And gouged by doubt
the three of us suspected all along
that when you spread the blueprints out, and pieced
together three impressive sons, at least
one piece confused you both. Impassive, strong,
we strode into the world. We theorize
you hid the parts of us that did not seem
to fit. We've come with crowbars, seeking gears,
glass rods we can install behind our eyes,
the missing coil on which our scalding scream
can cool, at last condensing into tears.

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