Of Mice and Men and Different Drummers

I step to the beat of a different drummer than most of those around me. Always have. I remember as a child not being terribly interested in childish things. What was going on here? I wondered. Why do people do the things they do - fight, and stuff? It all seemed rather silly. I kept my eyes and ears open, but went my separate way. No way was I going to buy into a lot of what went on around me. Something was - wrong, with it, all. I didn't know what, precisely. But I determined to find out. And then just got on with my life.

This went on until I hit university, and had 'a spiritual experience' in my Junior year. I had been accepted provisionally into its medical school starting the following year - subject to completing satisfactorily my undergraduate course of study to that point - and, having accomplished that major life goal, took a break from my exclusively pre-med studies and enrolled in a short-story writing class. I had become interested in writing during my high school years - along with my penchant for reading - and had also been inspired by my Freshman English instructor to continue with this aspect of my self-expression, somehow. During the course of the short-story class I found myself getting engrossed in a storyline that started taking on a life of its own, the form becoming something of a novella. I took it to my instructor, asking her what she thought, and should I 'cease and desist' and get back to the basic exercises. She read my growing manuscript, felt it was a valid exercise, and let me run with it. Which I did, slowly to the detriment of some of my other classes; that daily life focus receding to the back of my seeker's mind. (The story was about a young Resident surgeon triggered to go seeking for some answers within life, the search leading to questions about life itself.)

One night, working on it in a small airless room in the basement of the Men's dormitory where I lived, I found myself getting restless, and feeling blocked; uneasy. I got up and walked around the room a bit and then started in again, on my old second-hand Royal portable typewriter; but something was not quite right. I couldn't concentrate, or break through. So I went out for a walk. It was a dark and stormy night -no; beg pardon. A little joke there, that you will either get or not; it doesn't matter. No big deal. Nor was my restlessness; it just was. I wore my windbreaker - this was February of that year, and in northern California, so it had to be somewhat cold - but it was, as I recall, a gentle evening. After ten o'clock. Not too much movement on the campus; some people returning to their living quarters from having spent the evening studying in the Main Libe, or in nearly empty classrooms on The Quad, as I had done myself many a time. This time I found myself wanting some privacy, and something prompted me to go to the outdoor amphitheater on the edge of the campus. It was a large natural amphitheater, set in a grove of trees; and though there were no lights there, I knew the space well enough to make my way through the trees to it. (It was used mostly for our annual Spring Sing, when all the fraternities and other living units and other groups would compete in choirs. I remember one Spring Sing where the Nursing School cohort filed down to the stage in raingear to perform 'Singin' In the Rain', in the middle of which it started actually to rain, gently, briefly, and then stopped before they ended the piece. I kid you not.) Inside the secluded space, I sat down - finding myself, after my eyes had adjusted to the dark, about halfway up the tiers - and tried to collect my thoughts, wondering what was going on for me; in me. The first thing that came to me was how dark, and silent, it was in there. I could hear nothing, see nothing - except a night sky wall-to-wall with stars. Not a cloud; no moon. Nothing, except me and the universe.

And then two things happened to me. The first was my mind taking on the idea of how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. I felt as though I were in the bottom of a well, looking up at the immensity of the universe, and feeling a bit foolish, about my, and man's, puny plans. The second thing that happened to me was as if in answer to my unspoken thought: Something very large came whooshing out of that immensity, and hit me in my heart area, and knocked me back onto the cool grass; where I lay for some minutes, tingling and, strangely, sobbing uncontrollably. And then 'it' passed; and I sat back up, and my left brain kicked in, and I asked myself, pre-med analytically, 'Now what was that all about?' And I got an answer. No voice; just a clear message in my head, that: the Universe has purpose, and that purpose is Good.

And I have not doubted it ever since.

And that knowing has brought me to this time and place; when we, as a race, of 'spiritual beings having a human experience', are going to bring the drama process to an end, for a new stage of life on Earth to kick in: the stage of culmination. Singularity. Transcendence, to a new kind of being. Living higher in our consciousnesses than heretofore. Cutting the karmic load, and getting on with it. 'It': embodying more of our spiritual natures in our daily lives.

And the key to the transition is to do away with money.

Which is something else that came to me, in my subsequent life, when I put away childish things, and decided to just get on with it.

'It': the process.

Of life. Wherein life is a school; and the purpose is to graduate.


P.S. A couple of footnotes:

(1) My amphitheater experience, I realized later, was very much as though I had entered into a sensory deprivation chamber, isolated and alone with nothing but my mind. Years later, when I came across the work of John C. Lilly, I knew what he was talking about, and realized more fully the assistance I had been given on my path in life that fateful night at Stanford.

(2) I want also to recognize, and appreciate, the role that my short-story writing instructor played in my life's journey. She also told me, in a note in reply to one of mine wherein I told her I was dropping out of her class and school itself, to go on a search in life for answers: "And now your work begins."
Did it ever.

And while I'm at it, in this frame of mind, I would like to acknowledge the influence of my Freshman English instructor in this whole unfolding story. At the end of that year's classes with him, he asked me to wait behind a bit, and, as the other students drifted off, gifted me with a copy of the works of John Donne (which he inscribed, simply: 'To Duane Stanfield, from his English instructor, 1952-53'). My favorite part of Donne's musings became, not the well-known part of his XVIIth Meditation - the For Whom the Bell Tolls quote - but earlier on in that particular stream of thought, where he says (something like; this is from memory): 'The bell doth toll for him who thinkes it doth; and though it intermit againe, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.'
Indeed.

As for the sobbing I experienced in my isolation tank that eventful night at university: I think it was from feeling so cut off from my roots. So far, far away from home. In a sector of the creation where the inhabitants had such a long, long way to go.
But we're getting there.
Slow. But sure.
As sure as the bell that tolls for us all.
Regardless of our best-laid plans...