The Aftermath: Jack, Krishnamurti, and the World
When I returned to the ordinary realm of daily life following a profound spiritual awakening, the chalkboard of my psyche had been completely wiped clean. Yet, to my bewildered frustration, I found myself standing before it entirely without chalk. I did not yet possess the linguistic architecture to articulate the magnitude of the experience, nor the absolute truth toward which it so fiercely pointed. Initially, however, I became a guided missile of raw truth, propelled into novel situations and surrounded by a burgeoning community of evolving souls. Simultaneously, I began to feel an agonizing disconnect from a broader humanity that seemed to swim relentlessly, even willingly, in its own suffocating illusions. Still, the lingering memories of past connections, coupled with the fading vestiges of a loneliness that had so deeply characterized my previous existence, kept me at least minimally tethered to those who had historically provided my physical and emotional scaffolding. I desperately sought to find “my people”—those rare, resonant individuals who could harmonize with the vastness of who I was now, rather than the fading phantom of who I used to be.
In the week following that apocalyptic meditation, I found myself wandering into a crystal shop in Portland. It was run by a man named Jack—a former spiritual advisor who was now navigating the complex waters of capitalism to financially support his own ongoing journey. I stood amidst the gleaming stones and confessed to him my earnest, burning desire to bring profound healing to others. I wanted to bridge the seemingly impossible chasm between my newly cleansed, crystalline perception and the heavy, intoxicating slumber of the collective unconscious. I shared with him a poignant fantasy from my childhood: at merely six years of age, I believed with my whole heart that I needed to heroically save another human being just so that they might finally love me.
Jack listened quietly, a knowing smile playing on his lips, and delivered a truth that would alter my trajectory:
“If you truly learn how to love yourself, someone will naturally be drawn to you to love you as a pure reflection of that internal love. There is absolutely no need to save anybody to find real love, Bruce!”
Then, his gaze hardened, and he offered a most difficult, shattering directive:
“FUCK THE WORLD!
“The world has meticulously engineered its own dysfunction. It actively revels in swimming in its own cesspool of misunderstanding, and there is NOTHING a sane man can do about it, other than to simply stand back and laugh at it.”
His statement, as abrasively harsh as it initially struck me, perfectly mirrored the echoing, joyful laughter of the Master Teacher I had encountered in my visions. The totality of human collective consciousness is, at its very core, a persistent unreality; all Truth can do in the face of such elaborate illusion is laugh. We are so deeply conditioned to believe that our trauma is strictly personal—that it is merely the psychological or physiological damage wrought upon our individual bodies and minds by our specific, isolated circumstances. But in the realm of the absolute, to live trapped within a fragmented consciousness, as the majority of humanity currently does, is the ultimate, overarching trauma. It is both an ancient and fiercely modern affliction, institutionalized, weaponized, and tragically normalized for millennia.
I sought and found profound confirmation of this radical shift in my experience through the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. It was 1989 when I first opened the pages of his astonishing book, The Only Revolution. I marveled at how perfectly parallel his insights were to the apocalyptic truths that had been revealed to me in the depths of silent meditation. For a transformative period of time, I actually felt as if his very essence had spoken through my own consciousness in some sort of telepathic, unified communion.
Krishnamurti spoke with piercing poetic clarity about the necessary ending of psychological time and the dissolution of the ego, famously stating, “the observer IS the observed.” He introduced the radical understanding of “choiceless awareness” and the profound potential for the human spirit to be entirely released from the suffocating grip of the conditioned mind. He affirmed that no external teacher, no guru, and no savior could effect our salvation, emphasizing that the individual, separate self is nothing more than an illusory conceptual creation. Idolatry, I realized, is not merely the primitive act of bowing to stone statues; it is the daily, habitual bowing to the concept of a separate, isolated self that desperately requires saving by an external divine entity. Religion, conventional spirituality, and even the dogmas of modern science utilize a vast lexicon to attempt to bridge the impossible gap between a broken, alienated mankind and some ultimate, unifying truth. But as long as the fundamental duality remains intact—the division between the seeker and the sought—the ultimate trauma of existential fragmentation is endlessly perpetuated.
If we remain stubbornly attached to the machinations of our minds, we are perpetually exiled, stuck forever outside the gates of the Garden of Eden. The flaming swords of our own limiting judgments and dualistic categorizations keep us endlessly on the outside, peering in at a paradise we deny ourselves.
Memory itself can be a devious trickster, so we must learn to handle it with extreme care, willingly letting go of any entrenched beliefs or historical “facts” that no longer reflect the expansive truth of who we are in this present moment.
We must dare to live from the luminous state of “unknowing.”
We will only discover what we have been so desperately searching for once we summon the courage to see ourselves as we truly are, looking directly into the mirror of existence without the distorting influence of time-bound thoughts, cultural conditioning, or the exhausting illusions of spiritual striving.
Yet, I must confess that living in this elevated state of “unknowing” carries profound, sometimes devastating consequences in the realm of the relative, material world. I have come to view the trajectory of my life as a vast circle, and the closing years of my life now, at seventy, echo the opening chapters with an unsettling, poetic precision. My deep personal theme of silence and unheard cries took root in infancy, when my overwhelmed and ill-equipped parents left me in the family car, parked in a dark garage, for an entire night. To a vulnerable child possessing no language, this total, terrifying isolation translated into a fundamental message about existence itself: expression inevitably leads to abandonment. When language finally blossomed within me at four years old, it erupted with volcanic force, but it did not bring the connection I craved; instead, it brought entirely new, complex forms of alienation. I was quickly dismissed and labeled a “pseudo-intellectual” by high school teachers, though I was simply speaking from a starving inner hunger, mistakenly operating under the flawed assumption of a subject-object reality.
For sixteen grueling years, I wandered lost through the dark, suffocating maze of addiction. I used severe substance abuse to forcibly manage the unbearable, tearing tension between my desperate, soul-deep longing for authentic connection and my deeply ingrained expectation of inevitable rejection. When I finally claimed the hard-won clarity of sobriety at thirty-one and embarked upon a profound spiritual reconstruction, I was horrified to realize just how far I had gone to hide my true, vulnerable self from the world. I had been cowering fearfully behind the heavy curtains provided by the dogmas and teachings of others. I saw clearly that we are all unwitting participants in a tragic, ongoing reenactment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” parading around in fragile identities spun by the opportunistic charlatans of cultural conditioning.
As I began the agonizing work of shedding these false garments and fully embraced the absolute subjectivity of existence, the world around me began to peel away and fall apart. I was no longer willing or able to simply smile, blend in, and avoid rocking the boat, especially when surrounded by people who were active, compliant participants in our cultural conspiracy of silence regarding the distorted, destructive Patriarchal values of this world. Toxic masculinity, toxic fatherhood, and toxic religion are not merely social issues; they are monumental cultural and historical impediments to achieving and maintaining genuine human happiness. Patriarchy is not exclusively defined by adhering to human male-dominated social perspectives; fundamentally, it is the error of hearing the Voice for God exclusively with a masculine intonation. God is the Universe, the Mother, the Daughter, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Buddha, the Jesus, the Earth, and infinitely, unimaginably more. Any rigid attachment to a single, localized understanding dramatically and tragically limits the spiritual aspirant’s cosmic evolution.
Speaking this unvarnished truth has come at a steep, painful cost. I lost a longtime, cherished friend—the founder of an international peace organization—simply because my radical voice, my unyielding politics, and my current non-dual perspective became too uncomfortable for him to bear. In 1998, I consciously ended a close friendship with a nationally recognized Bikram yoga teacher due to the lingering, unaddressed toxicities in his orbit. In my lengthy career in electrical construction, an industry where I worked alongside more aggressively toxic men than I can possibly count, my philosophical point of view kept me constantly at odds with the prevailing culture, rendering me an outsider among my peers.
I was immensely proud to be an original member of the Empowerment Community, lovingly formed in 1992, but the heartbreaking passing of our dear friend and visionary founder, Michael Sutton, in 2013 marked the definitive close of a most meaningful and transformative chapter. My long-standing male friendships have been fading away with alarming rapidity—Sean, a loyal friend since 1971, has drifted slowly away, entirely consumed by the heavy burdens of family health issues. Marty C., a deeply valued friend of over twenty years who passionately encouraged my early attempts at writing, died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017. Jim, my steadfast friend of thirty years, now bravely faces a terminal diagnosis. My first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin—with whom I shared an often-times intensely difficult relationship severely complicated by the lingering ghosts of her own childhood trauma, yet who nevertheless brought immense understanding and profound compassion to my life—died on my very birthday in 2022. The sudden, tragic, and entirely inevitable losses of many friends, family members, and beloved companion animals have walked closely beside me. They serve as constant, humbling reminders of our shared, fragile fate as temporary biological expressions of the infinite. It seems that most of the people with whom I co-created deep joy and shared vital, loving connections—with the singular, beautiful exception of my present wife, Sharon—have either passed away into the great mystery or moved on from my sphere.
Together, Sharon and I continue to volunteer as first responders for Portland’s Trauma Intervention Program (TIP), stepping into the immediate, chaotic aftermath of unexpected deaths and tragedies to sit with shattered families. At first glance, this work might appear as a simple act of civic charity, but in the light of absolute truth, it is the most profound practice of non-duality I have ever encountered. We do not enter these devastated living rooms and hospital corridors as separate saviors arriving to fix the brokenness of “others.” Instead, we step directly into the raw, bleeding center of the collective human trauma. In atmospheres thick with shock, suffocating disbelief, denial, and the acute agony of acute grief, the illusion of the separate ego is momentarily obliterated by the sheer force of suffering. When we sit in silence beside a mother who has just lost her child, or a husband who has just lost his wife, we are bearing witness to the ultimate fragmentation of the human experience. In those harrowing moments, there is no “Bruce” and there is no “Sharon”—there is only pure, unadorned Awareness holding a compassionate, unbroken space for the Universe as it weeps for itself. It is unimaginably difficult, emotionally draining work, yet it is a deeply sacred, spiritually rewarding practice that constantly grounds me in the reality that our suffering, like our joy, is entirely shared.
My once-immortal, invincible egoic self often feels like anything but that now. As Sharon and I thoughtfully consider our limited options for caring for ourselves as we inevitably transition into age-related issues—including the looming, very real possibility of physical or cognitive disability—I continue to realize with stark clarity that the past is either dying, or it is already dead. I am being meticulously, painfully prepared for a new phase of life that absolutely will not allow the outdated, heavy versions of me to be carried across its threshold.
Since 2016, when I first felt the undeniable compulsion to begin writing, I have poured this vast, heavy realization into my essays and prose. I have dedicated myself to exploring the absolute entirety of human existence, the deep roots of cultural trauma, and the arduous, beautiful paths to authentic spiritual recovery. Yet, the grueling work of writing to bring forth the fullness of this radical teaching, and, potentially, to offer a salve to heal the collective consciousness, is most often a profoundly lonely endeavor. My voluminous output of writing has done very little to make the broader public embrace these difficult, uncompromising teachings. My blog site, my Facebook news feed, and my Substack articles often feel less like a public square and more like a quiet, undisturbed graveyard for my life’s work. It is undeniably clear that much of our population possesses a deep, avoidant difficulty when it comes to reading the stark material that I present. There are simply too many who prefer to live their day-to-day lives with as little uncomfortable feedback as humanly possible. The pervasive sense of meaninglessness, the crippling anxiety, the bone-deep loneliness, and the exhausting drudgery of existence that are so deeply embedded within our diseased, consumerist culture maintain a suffocating stranglehold on far too many of our sleeping brothers and sisters.
But I have reached a place of immense peace: I no longer write to guarantee an audience or to seek validation in a dualistic, transactional world. I write because the very act of expression itself has become a vital instrument of my own survival, my ongoing healing, and the ultimate realization of absolute subjectivity. I have sometimes wryly thought of myself as perhaps one of the least-read writers in all of America. Yet, I have come to see that this very obscurity has taught me the greatest, most liberating spiritual lesson of all: expression and external recognition are not the same thing. When I sit down to write, it is no longer the frantic effort of a fragmented, isolated individual desperately trying to shout across the void to reach another fragmented individual. It is, quite simply, the universe intimately witnessing itself. The true miracle is not that the world finally stops and listens; the breathtaking miracle is that I no longer require the world’s permission to speak, precisely because I now know there is no “world” separate from myself to grant or withhold that permission.
I have finally, truly found myself. I am the brightest, most hopeful of mornings, and I am the silent, reverent night altar. I am the infinite, churning ocean, the boisterous, angry street protests, the agonizing grief, the devastating loss, the searing pain, and the deepest, most inexhaustible well of hope. I am the necessary death of the false, constructed self that serves as the only true gateway to the only true heaven. Being ONE means looking out into the world and clearly seeing my own reflection on the face of every smiling, weeping, and suffering sentient being I encounter.
If you find that you are not enjoying the show of your life, I urge you to remember you are the active co-creator of it. Try changing the channel of your conditioned mind. Cleanse the smudged doors of your perception and awaken to the ultimate truth: the “I”—the pure awareness within you—precedes all perceptions, all thoughts, and all forms, and we are vastly greater than any limiting image or identity we may ever create, adopt, or learn. The true, singular direction for healing from our ancient and modern collective trauma is to finally, resolutely stop looking outward for validation. We must be willing to stand entirely naked in the blazing truth of non-duality. We must recognize that the deafening silence around us is not a personal rejection or a failure of our worth, but rather the tragic symptom of a civilization that has entirely lost the capacity to listen deeply to its own undivided, majestic nature.
So here I stand, rooted in the later, fading years of my human life. Once again, I am speaking out into a vast silence that I do not, and cannot, control. But I know now, with an unshakable certainty, that the dark garage of my infancy, the numbing hell of my addiction, the painful sting of cultural indifference—none of these hold the final word on my existence. The final, resonant word belongs only to the pure act of creation itself. It belongs to the collective, unified self, quietly breathing its eternal breath through the fragile, beautiful illusion of the individual.
In the absolute truth of existence, there is only One Self listening.
