The Birthing of a Memoir
Introduction
“Tobe and the River Is,” in the deepest and most intimate sense is a memoir, though it was written with a flavor of a spiritual fantasy adventure.
The Nautilus Book Award was given in the Memoir Category. They expressed appreciation for how a memoir was creatively woven into the format of “Tobe and the River Is.”
The Strange Story of How
“Tobe and the River Is” Came to Be
I had just gotten my job as a security police officer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and I was beginning a thirteen-week training program. At lunch, I could not wait to leave the classroom and go out into nature. I was used to being out on the trails in the mountains and mesas, hiking or painting. But there was a problem. The guys in the class wanted me to go out to lunch with them. I politely turned down their offer. But I could tell that I better come up with a believable excuse or my refusals would create alienation and resentment. The next time they asked, I heard myself surprisingly blurt out, “Thanks, but I can’t. I am working on a book.”
I was relieved to see that they accepted the excuse with no hesitancy. But I was left wondering, where did that response come from? I wasn’t writing a book. I gave it no more thought and quickly made my way out of the classroom to the quiet and peace of a nearby canyon. Ah, to be back in nature! The moment I leaned my back against a tree and began to relax, a voice broke the silence and said, “You are going to write a book.” The voice seemed to be in my body, but at the same time outside it.
The voice did not startle me, for I had had many encounters with the inexplicable by then. But the news did give me pause. After a moment to think, my response was simple and firm: “OK, I will do it. BUT I must experience everything, or I will not write it.”
The voice came back immediately with the response, “We were hoping you would say that.”
And with that, “Tobe and the River Is” was born. And since I wanted to experience everything, it wasn’t born as some kind of fiction but as a creative memoir.
I was able to weave a touch of this scene later in the book, where Auriel is teaching Tobe how to see the River Is. When he finally sees the River, he is filled with joy. But then something begins to shift in him, and he says to Auriel, “Looking at the River Is is not enough; I must swim in it!” And as I was thinking of Auriel’s response to type into the book, I heard the echo of that gentle voice in the canyon say, “We were hoping you would say that.” So I typed Auriel saying, “I was hoping you would say that.”
For the next thirteen and a half years I worked swing shift at Los Alamos so I could write and paint in the mornings and early afternoons. I approached going to work as an open-eyed meditation. I collected experiences, observations, and revelations and wrote them down on the 3 x 5 pad I always carried in my pocket. At work, I allowed no distractions. I stood whenever I could. Though the first few hours could be torturous in terms of monotony and how slowly time would pass, eventually a veil would tear, and I found myself in a new vibrant world filled with miracles. These moments of insight and revelation are sprinkled throughout the book.
My test for whether the night was a good night was to be able to say to myself, as I was walking into the Headquarters to sign out, “I would not trade tonight for a four-day paid vacation in Hawaii,” and mean it with my whole heart; then I knew it was a good night. And that happened a lot.
Memoir Elements in the Book
To illustrate how a memoir can take on the seeming nature of a spiritual fantasy and yet remain a memoir, I have included excerpts from the book with explanations on how it arose out of my experiences. These are just a few of the many examples.
Page 1 The Great Nothing with Illustration
Though I was never a professional fisherman (I did do underwater construction for a little while), like Tobe, I was irresistibly pulled to drawing and painting when I turned twenty. The book opens with the description of the village of Soñadora on the edge of the world with the Great Nothing beyond. The Great Nothing was inspired by an experience I had as I was plein air painting in the beautiful high desert of New Mexico. In the middle of a brushstroke, a calm voice said, “Imagine nothingness.”
I put my brush down, closed my eyes, and relaxed. I started to sense a dark stillness—a “nothingness.” It came more and more into focus in my mind as the moments passed. When I opened my eyes, I was startled at how much more alive and energetic everything now appeared. I saw the landscape in a direct, fresh way, as if seeing it for the first time, and I felt the inexplicable mystery of space/time. As I continued to paint, this sense of nothingness became like a backdrop for the landscape, making the energetic essence of the rocks, plants, trees, and clouds more apparent. I was able to hold awareness of both the physical world and this Void simultaneously.
The effect of nothingness as a backdrop to this world started to occur more and more often through the coming weeks, always enhancing the experience, whether I was looking at a person, a coffee cup, towering buildings, a tree, a horse in a meadow, or birds flying. And after a while, the sensation started to develop into two distinct dimensions—the more limited time/space physical dimension, and the vast dimension of this living Void. Another curious effect of this “nothingness” was that the quality of form started going through a transformation. Form was becoming more energetic—less dense, seeming almost holographic at times.
Page 7 Romance
Tobe’s hesitancy in his relationship with Kallee mirrored my own occasional sense of lack at times in my intimate relationships. “Yes, our life together could be a beautiful thing, if only…I have a lot to learn yet. I am so inconsistent…so incomplete. What do I have to offer anyone—much less anything beautiful and lasting?”
But over time, my heart has opened, just as Tobe’s did. And I have come to know of a more all encompassing, radiant Love that can flow through me—and through us all.
Page 12 Light in the Meadow with Illustration
I have had multiple experiences with light as a medium of communication with a higher source, which have transformed my life. One of the most notable was one day in the 1980s when I entered the dining room of my home, and there was an outline of a figure, seven feet tall, made of radiant Light, so bright and intense that it would have been impossible to look upon if the Light were not of a vibration from another dimension. It was not only possible to look upon the Light, I was also able to “read” it. What it said clearly was, “I AM God as Angel.”
No doubt there were other downloads that occurred from that Light, but I was not conscious of them. But one thing I realized was that if that Light had been of some specific Angel like a Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, or a Uriel, the Light’s vibration would have been lowered by a specific personality. But this Light was pure, unbridled radiance, brighter than the sun, exactly because it was the direct expression of the Divine or God.
Over the years, I have come to see another lesson in this experience: If I am able to let go of my identification with who I think I am in this body and open to the idea that this physical form too is God, then this body takes on a higher vibration, and the sense of self, too, is transformed into a higher vibration. Then this body is seen as, “I AM God as Body,” for God then is all there is—even in the very heart of individuation. This is the mystery.
Page 14 The Storm
My mind has experienced darkness and many fearful, ungrounded moments of raw vulnerability. This is described here and again later in the book with the black holes Tobe falls into. But such moments have been a blessing, too, for they have become a catalyst to move from this very limited false sense of self with all its weaknesses and inconsistencies to a more expansive, unified, and freer sense of Self, full of joy and love.
Page 16 The Dream with Illustration
This was a very clear dream I had one night, in all its detail. The only thing I added in the book was the glowing word “Inlăkesh” above the door. The dream is about becoming real. And finding out what that means is the great purpose of our life.
Page 21 The Burning House with Illustration
The burning house is the symbol for me of that experience of letting go of the old structures of self and courageously stepping into the unknown. This happens throughout my day.
Page 25 The Mechanical Man
The body, being the primary mode of experience here in the world, it seemed important to me to get a deeper intuitive sense of its nature. So, back in the 80’s, for a couple of years in the medical labs at college, I worked on cadavers. And for a couple of decades I carried illustrated anatomy books with me to help strengthen the awareness of the mechanics of the body. I studied the skeleton, the muscles, and the nervous system, along with a bit of the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems. Over time, the awareness of the body grew, and now, I am often aware of the eyelids blinking over eyeballs in a skull, while watching a “personality” arising second by second, out of body sensations, out of the posture, the breath, the thoughts, and moods passing through. It seems counterintuitive, yet I have found that the more my awareness goes into the body, the more free of it my being becomes.
Another great benefit of having studied anatomy is that when I am looking at a scene with people in it moving about, and I see them as skeletons too, beneath their clothes and skin, the sleepy spell starts to lift that covers our world, and I begin to experience the amazing, radiant truth of what everyone is beneath their illusions of who they think they are.
This body/mechanical perspective is only one lens to look through. What is really wonderful is that, at the same time one is experiencing that, there can be love and appreciation for their unique physical expression in space/time. The heart can function on multiple levels. I often feel the body as divine, with love flowing in and through it to others—a body under very different laws than the world holds as true.
Page 26 The Dark Holes with Illustration
Negative, insecure, depressed, and anxious thoughts have ravaged my inner world many times. But like Tobe in the book where he learned that, “…no matter how dark the hole or how far he fell, eventually he would end up on solid ground again.” And like Tobe, that has given me confidence to face the darkness. And I have discovered that it is in looking clear-eyed at the darkness that the transformation through awareness can occur.
Page 28 The Bubble People
Throughout the day I study what it feels like to be identified with thoughts and emotions, and how, at times, that gives rise to the feeling of being trapped in the human psychology. One day, feeling the painful limitation of this human condition, the image of the bubble people came to my mind.
Page 33 The Fantastic Carnival Phantasmagoria with Illustration
Many things in the carnival are metaphors for things in my life. One example is that when I was young, like Tobe at the carnival, I would be “…spending many hours at booths that tested his (my) strength and skill. He (I) would compete as the crowd applauded and cheered him (me) on.” And this I did by competing in a variety of ways, sometimes with great success. This was the way my ego was building a strong, successful sense of self, and this is a natural phase we pass through. Later, I was fortunate to begin to learn a deeper truth and to see where real strength and success really lie.
Page 50 The War Tent
As a boy, in the woods with my friends, we would play war for hours and hours. The tales of heroes enthralled me. I would read books and watch movies about them so I could emulate their strength and character. My father, too, as a chaplain in the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam, received medals for his bravery in war zones (though he refused to carry a weapon, for he saw everyone as God’s children). But as I reached my late teens, all that positive fascination with war and heroes began to fade, especially with the draft looming.
I wanted to express in the War Tent the little bit I had come to understand about the warrior role. I respected the warriors' courage and their overriding love and strong commitment for each other. “Of all the tents, the Great War tent was the saddest and yet, strangely, the most touching. Here and there Tobe saw such selfless and courageous acts, unequaled by anything he had ever seen anywhere.”
And like Tobe, empathy, too, filled me, for “The warrior role could turn so tragic. His heart ached for their suffering and the real price they paid for admittance onto this field of pain. And beneath all the reasons why (and there were always reasons), Tobe wondered, But why?”
The character in the War Tent with the lower part of his face blown away was a fellow I saw one afternoon when I was visiting a military hospital. It was in a dark part of the hospital, and as I turned the corner in the hall, there he was. The shock of adrenaline shot through my body. It seemed impossible that a person could survive with that much of the face destroyed. I was horrified by what I saw—the eerie expression in the man’s eyes pleading for help, and more desperately, for acceptance. But in that moment of weakness I could give neither.
Page 51 Tobe’s Nightmare with Illustration
This is a depiction of a dark moment, the kind we all go through, where this life seems shallow, empty, and void of all meaning. These are states that come to us; that we must pass through to find out that, in the end, they hold no real power over us.
Page 53 The Great Hall of Mirrors
The mirrors showing all the distortions of oneself in quick succession reflect my experience of self-observation through the day. The Hall of Mirrors ends with an old man lying down, taking his last breaths with a countenance of an unfulfilled, discontented person. This scene was inspired by the first part of my near-death experience, where my car tumbled violently up a hill, and I was thrown out lying in the grass, paralyzed with blood flowing out of the head. (I spent the next 29 days in intensive care, and it took a year to walk again without a walker.) Lying there, I saw this transparent field stretched all the way across Sacramento Valley and as high up as my eyes could see. It was about 26 miles out, moving closer. Everything in that field was in Oneness, and the thought came: I am dying. I am entering back into that field of Oneness.
At that precise moment a voice said, so loud that it made the bones in the chest vibrate, “You have lived the life of an imaginary creature.”
At those words, instantly, a wave of unbearable emotional pain consumed me, so intense it eclipsed the physical pain. A sense of the tragedy at having to leave this earth, this incredible gift of life before I had discerned the deeper meaning of my own existence ravaged my inner world.
Since then, whenever the memory of that event comes, it is followed by a determination that when I face death again, I will be at peace, for I will have dedicated my life to unraveling the mystery of my existence.
Toward the end of the book, when Tobe witnesses the transformation of the Carnival, he goes to the Hall of Mirrors again and walks to the last mirror where his old body was before, but the old tortured body is gone; there is now only “an intense Light—vast and full of peace. Love, too, was in the Light.”
During my near-death experience, it was the Light that was projecting every cell and molecule of the body onto the hospital bed. The Light was all; there was no boundary to the Light. It is our Source, and It is what we return to when the body is put down.
Page 62 The Portal to Inlăkesh
What the bookseller said to Tobe to help him find the portal to Inlăkesh was simple. It is what I do multiple times every day to make a shift to a clearer vision. The bookseller told Tobe that he first needed to “still his inner noise, all the inner clutter.” Then, as Tobe was looking at the Carnival, the Bookseller said the next thing was to see “everything as perfect, whole and glorious—with no spot of darkness anywhere in it—no matter what you are looking on.” Sometimes this shift can take a while, and one must be patient. This process I call blessing, and it works incredibly well, but there are also a variety of other mental tools one can use.
Page 65 Welcome to Inlăkesh
Tobe’s transition from being at the Carnaval to arriving at Inlăkesh parallels my movement through the day, from being body-identified to having the awareness expand into a freer, more spacious sense of Self. Then a new world begins to open—a world of incredible beauty, love, and peace. This world is Inlăkesh, seen through eyes alight with Spirit. This is the world that I attempt to reach throughout the day.
For Tobe’s initial experience of Inlăkesh, I went to one of my favorite lakes in the Rocky Mountains and wrote the description of it in the book, seeing it through the eyes of wonder.
Page 70 The Emanations of Objects
For me, this is an important entry in the book in terms of my life. It briefly refers to one of the main elements in my paintings and one of the major perspectives through which I experience my world. I dedicate one of the four sections in “Raising Perception” on my website to the “Emanations of Objects,” and it is a wonderful way to experience one’s world.
Page 72 Mathematical Perfection Everywhere! with Illustration
Tobe’s experiences of seeing mathematical harmony in form were my own. I studied intuitive mathematics, where one goes deep into the energy essence of numbers to train the mind to move to a more intuitive level, where discovery and equations can arise—an intuitive realm where mathematicians get their inspiration. I never became proficient at it, but the power and mystery of numbers did become alive for me.
And just like it is described in the book, one day the wind blew a leaf down the walkway of my home near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it was shooting off mathematical equations describing its every move as it tumbled. But not being a mathematician, I could not grab the equations before they faded away. At other times I have looked at mountains and felt their essence in terms of numbers and mathematical equations.
As I look on the world, I sense the will of a higher Consciousness or Intelligence projecting this mathematical harmony into form in this time/space dimension. My appreciation for the power of numbers goes deep, and that is why I often put numbers in my paintings.
Page 77 The Being of Insects with Illustration
One day in the mountains an insect flew by and in my heightened state of awareness at that moment, in a fraction of a second, I was able to perceive the bottomless, endless being of the insect, and then another insect flew by, and another, until space was filled with all these dimensions of vast “being-nesses” flying about, along with my own as I was standing there. What a delightful surprise that was!
Page 80 The Borderland Man
The Borderland Man lives on the borderland between worlds "…between Here and Everywhere. No finer line exists anywhere.” That statement accurately defines the essence of my life and the lives of many people I know.
To put it another way: it is possible to experience the moment with a dual awareness. Then I am aware of my bodily existence in space/time, while simultaneously, I am aware of the changeless, unified field of Being surrounding and permeating me.
Page 85 Swimming in the River Is with Illustration
Is there any greater joy than to feel this changeless life of the River Is all about us? And then to move out of body identification and dive into it and let It become our Being. Here there is no loss, but only gain. This is the place of true joy, for here we discover our true Self.
There is an Eastern saying, “Be like a salt doll and dive into the Ganges.”
Page 90 A True Tree Tale with Illustration
This was a painful yet extraordinary experience. The Cerro Grande fire burned through Los Alamos in May 2000. The town was evacuated, but because I was part of the security police force, I had to stay. Sometimes I was mere yards away from trees burning. Day after day, day and night, watching slopes of majestic, beautiful trees being consumed by flames, tore my heart open and a sorrow fell out of me, filling the scene.
Then one night, this memory came of when I was putting down a special dog of mine. Waves of grief and pain overpowered my inner world as the dog was taking its last breaths. Then a voice said firmly, “You are being selfish. She needs you now.” Instantly a focus came, born of true love, and I could feel a high-energy field holding my dog in her transition.
Along with that memory came the realization that the trees too that night needed my focus and my love as they faced their own transition into a different expression of life. My pain immediately disappeared as I felt this amazing love and power extend out to the trees on the slope in flame, knowing there was no death. It was that event that night which inspired Tobe’s True Tree Tale.
Page 100 Tobe’s Painting of the River Is with Illustration
It was a lot of fun to put this scene in the book. It is a playful yet intimate way to describe my process of painting.
Page 109 The Village of Góndāwă and Swimming with Others with Illustration
Swimming with others can be very simple and immediate. It can take a variety of forms. But for me, one of the most approachable ways, and what I am doing right now, is to feel the life (the River Is) around me and how it permeates all of space. And then I open to the idea that it is a life I share with everyone.
Just turning the lens of awareness in that direction can be sufficient. If I keep affirming the presence of a shared consciousness, that truth often reveals itself in a very dynamic way.
Page 114 The Night in the Meadow with Illustration
There was an incredible period in my life for over a year, in the foothills of the high Sierra where I slept in my sleeping bag under the stars, even in the cold and snow. I slept on a tall elevated platform in the tree canopy. Lying there, a view of almost the whole night sky opened up before me. Through the night, I would wake up multiple times and be in a state of awe every time as I looked out at our incredible starry universe, along with its Milky Way and shooting stars. It never failed to astound me. As it says in the book, “… this breathtaking vision of the grandeur of the universe seemed like something that should be reserved for saints and the most holy ones, and even then, only after years of the most arduous dedication. Yet here it was: freely held out for all to look upon—even a simple, ordinary person like himself.”
Page 117 The Dream of the World with Illustration
This experience occurred one day when I embraced “my” power to dream a world. In the instant that happened, my awareness shot out of body and expanded into a vast Mind matrix as described in the book. That vast, unified Mind was experienced as projecting the whole landscape within Itself, as far as the eyes could see all around. I am one with that Mind as you are.
The world was no longer experienced as a solid thing. It became an imaginal world of Mind, no different than how our minds at night in our sleeping dreams create a seeming time/space dimension within itself and fills it with a rich display of people, places, and events, all in astounding detail—with trees blowing in the wind, streams flowing, storms with hundreds of thousands of raindrops, bustling cities filled with people moving about and on and on, creating on the fly, an endless array of creative projections. And what is amazing is how, in our dreams at night, generally, the mind creates everything obeying the same laws of our world: the way water flows, the way objects fall and shatter with gravity, etc., creating a believable world that we can experience, that only exists as a projection of mind.
Page 125 Tobe Swallowed by the Great Fish with Illustration
The Great Fish is simply a metaphor for the Unified Field, the Self, and even God. Tobe being swallowed by the Great Fish represents my experiences of a movement out of the state of limitation of being body-identified with the finite sense of the separate self, to being swallowed or taken up into a seemingly boundless sense of Being. And this can happen multiple times throughout the day.
Page 130 The Transformation of the Carnival with Illustration
The transformation of the Carnival is the transformation of our world. Again, that happens every day and multiple times throughout the day for me. Perhaps one day it will become permanent. Until then, I am just grateful to experience it when it occurs.
That shift happens in a variety of ways; one way is when I open my heart to the love that is around me and that flows out from me. Another way is to let go of my judgments of others—of who I think they are—and to see past their physical form (and who they think they are), to their true radiant nature, pure and perfect in every way, one with me in a shared consciousness. Holding that perspective, I can then watch the world transform before my eyes.
There are many more instances I could have listed from my life that were the inspiration for something in the book. I hope that what is here is enough to add an extra element of enjoyment to the book for you.