An Old Friend Treats Me As His Enemy

As part of my journey to understand my present, I have been reading about my Buddhist teacher, Lama Yeshe, and all of his Western students.

“Lama,” as he was affectionally called, was a Buddhist monk who fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama when the Chinese invaded in 1959. He became a favourite with the hippies hanging about India and Nepal at the time, and with them built the Foundation for Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition – or FPMT.

I never met Lama – he died in 1984 long before I discovered Buddhism – but many of my Buddhist friends knew Lama. Reading about all the places he visited and taught tugged at me sentimentally, and prompted me to reach out to an old Buddhist friend I had not been in contact with for 15 years.

I tried his mobile with some trepidation - was the owner still at the other end? 

The phone answered automatically with his recorded voice; then I quickly hung up not knowing what message to leave. I thought “I want to surprise him” and started rehearsing my opening lines with a big smile inside.

A second time, ring-ring and no answer.

Finally, I tried a third time last night, and he answered immediately by asking me in a heavy voice:

“What do you want from me?!”

I started my rehearsed line…

“Now listen to me Eric…” 

but quickly lost confidence and stopped mid-sentence…

“F**k off c*nt!” and he hung up.

My first reaction was to laugh.

I wasn’t offended – he couldn’t have known it was me – but it certainly wasn’t the conversation I anticipated. 

What to do?

It was only last night, and I haven’t done anything. It teaches me how easily we project and hallucinate our way through life. I guess he thought I wanted him to donate to the some Cancer Fund or Charity and was sick of this kind of unsolicited call. 

And he saw that this was the THIRD time I had rung in just two days.

His reaction was a stark reminder of something I see all the time when sharing Alexander’s Discovery with my students: we project a hallucination on to our bodies, then react to that hallucination as though it was the truth.

The simplest example is how most individuals hallucinate that their aim joins their body at the shoulder, when, in fact, that happens at the neck. This distortion of truth results in untold numbers of painful outcomes, as people merrily dislocate their image of the arm from their shoulders.

We hallucinate all the time – who needs drugs? The place we can most easily discover this kind of thinking is in the way we communicate with our bodies.

Studying Alexander’s Discovery means seeking out any distorted thinking that is causing us pain.

Pain begotten by all the garbage concepts that have been fed to us since little children in school.

It can take months, years even, to discover the truth of you. 

That truth will set you free.

And the experience makes the meat it feeds upon.