El Chivo Esta Muerto

From February 14th, 1994, to February 14th, 1995, I was under the tutelage of a guru, the likes of which I will never see again.

Last night, as I was giving my Grad students a reading exam on the population figures and migration policy in Colorado and New Mexico, I absent-mindedly typed the name of my first guru into Google.

It was a random thing, something I have done once or twice, with no luck whatsoever. John, understandably, has no web presence at all. Except for the work of some of his more prominent students, he barely has any presence outside of the personal relationships of the hundreds of lost souls who he’s saved through his simple teachings (myself included).

Google responded with his LA Times obituary, published two days ago.

John was a complicated man, who struggled with many demons and, in his 78 years had lived through many, many adventures. He had been a blackjack dealer in Reno, a soldier in the Mexican Army, a billboard painter, a gold mine operator, a newspaper reporter, and, for the last 40 years, a leader of an Ashram in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

My mother was one of the founders of the Ashram. John told me that she had met him in Reno, where he was a hard drinking, well-connected blackjack dealer. She pestered him with spiritual and philosophical questions so much, that he was able to turn his life around, go back to the path he had abandoned, and open up a refuge for the many lost young people who were drifting around in the late sixties and early seventies. My mom and a few other wise women provided the nurturing, John provided the teaching. Among many others, my dad drifted in. Years later, John and others in the community provided hospice care and a refuge for my dying mother when my father was unwilling, or unable, to do so.

Despite the wisdom and compassion John exuded, he never lost his hard edge. When I drifted in at age 20, John had a nine millimeter Beretta tucked into a black leather fanny pack he carried at all times. He considered himself more of a Kshatriyas than a Brahman and, in addition to the weekly Satsang, he occasionally gave self-defense classes. He had also been a serious fencer when he was younger, and had a cool set of foils and epees, which I could never get any of the other students to practice with.

I remember one of these classes, which were mostly geared towards the smaller women in the group, where I was having a problem with a technique that required me to be smaller than my attacker. I asked him what I should do if I was too big to duck under his arm. He looked at me pointedly and said, “Punch him in the face.”

I received most of my instruction and one on one guidance from other senior students of John’s, but I cherish the time we did have together. For a few months, he let me pay off the loan the group had given me to get started in the area (I had arrived with absolutely nothing to my name at all, and they gave me enough to pay rent for a month and get groceries) by acting as his gopher for his various work projects around the compound. I hauled cement, hammered nails, worked the skilsaw and basically picked up the stuff that he, already weak from an earlier heart attack, wanted put somewhere. I learned more from his offhand remarks during the day than from any other person, before or since.

I want to write forever, honoring the man who changed my life so much, who really saved me, who is responsible in innumerable ways for the person I have become. Thousands of pieces of advice, stories of his teachers, stories of his life and, what I treasured most of all at the time, stories of my mother, all fit into that one year of my life. I left the valley a year, to the day, of my initiation. Outwardly, not much changed at all, inwardly, an entirely new person, not yet wise, but at least better able to see the path. His final advice, inscribed in my most cherished book:

“Learn to know the Truth, and then, when you need it, the Truth will know you”