Enlightenment on a HarleyEnlightenment taken loosely here, this is an example of a unitive experience. Excerpted from author Darrell G. Yardley's book, WindWalker: Journey into Science, Self, and Spirit (2000). 3
“Knock, Knock,” in Wyoming Coming out of the Black Hills of South Dakota, it has been a chilly mid-August morning, but the temperature is beginning to rise now. As we head northwest on US 16 toward Newcastle, Wyoming, the landscape begins to level out and the wind to increase as we approach the open prairie. I don’t mind the wind so much, having grown up with it, but Ken hates it. We are headed to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. As we cross into Wyoming and stop to take pictures of the state sign proudly announcing the state’s centennial, we are riding out onto a broad expanse of grassland. Passing through Newcastle, we head out onto the Thunder Basin National Grassland. Somewhere between Osage and Upton, Ken pulls far ahead of me. He becomes a speck in the distance, and I am alone on the immense prairie. A sudden strong crosswind nearly blows me off the road, catching me off guard. Another, even stronger, gust hits me, and I find myself blown into the other lane. I compensate and move back into my lane. The wind becomes constant again, and I realize I have not felt similar crosswinds this day. We have been driving into the wind, but these gusts are from another direction. It occurs to me that the wind might be “speaking” to me, trying to get my attention. I dismiss that thought as stupid. Another gust answers, as if in rebuttal, rattling my bike, and then is gone. Another strange thought comes, “Wind is knocking?” “‘Knock, knock.’ ‘Who’s there?’” comes my childhood reply. Wrong question. Someone opens a door and I step through. Prairie’s arms open and wrap themselves around me: mile after mile of waving wheatgrass and buffalograss. Wind, moving across her, strokes Prairie’s silky, grassy mane into undulating waves. From horizon to horizon, I feel her vastness and breathe in deeply. The Harley’s big twin pistons beat in synchrony with Wind. Harley and Wind, in turn, beat in rhythm with my own inner cadence. Above, Sky is brilliant, blazing-blue, with only a rare small cloudboat. Prairie sings, sighing her mournful song to me. With bittersweet music, she whispers of ages gone, of her many cycles of birth and death—life coming and going. She sings her melody as I ride. Tears come to my eyes as feelings of sadness and loneliness envelop me. Feelings of loss, of old ways gone, fill me. Endings and Beginnings dance together, mixing with my tears. Moving deeper and deeper into her great belly, I understand none of this. Interpretation is futile so overwhelming is the experience. I have entered another world. It is the same world but different. In the next instant there is yet another transformation—another shift in the Universe—and I drop further into this alternative reality. One minute I am riding across grassland prairie, conscious of her “out there” and me “in here.” Aware that we are distinct. The next moment our separateness dissolves, our boundaries evaporate, and I am catapulted beyond my five-sense, scientific universe. Prairie is an immense, living ocean that stretches out in all directions around me. I am a wavelet of her ocean of prairie-grass waves. I am an extension of her, not really separate, but connected with her in primal spirit and dance. Her dance, my dance, is the dance of life: the dance of death and rebirth. We are energy forms, contiguous, never really separate. Our separateness is an illusion. Enveloped in my expanding sense of consciousness, I am dumbfounded with wonder. As the asphalt unwinds below my boots, the Harley itself becomes but an extension of me. I am an extension of Prairie, and Prairie is Mother, giving life and nurturance. The Harley’s steel, its power, its rhythm, beat in rhythm with Universe and Wind. Our boundaries dissolve as I merge with the bike, Prairie, Wind, and Sky. Time stops. The World stops. Looking down, I see the roadway unrolling in slow motion grace beneath the bike. I think about reaching down and touching the asphalt to make sure it is real. The World is moving so slow, I feel I can simply step off the speeding Harley and walk along side of the bike. Glancing at the speedometer, I see that I am still traveling at 60 mph. Time moves like cold honey, barely perceptible, hanging in suspension. The image of ethanol chilled to the temperature of dry ice comes to mind—thick, viscous, and clear. Time hangs like cold ethanol: not quite solid but no longer liquid either, an in-between world of solid-liquid. Like the ethanol, I stand at an interface between worlds, not solid but not liquid either. My mind is lucid, clear, yet I am not quite sure where I am. On one level, I know that I am on my bike riding across this grassland on this road on this day. On another level, the world is totally different. I am Self watching self: an Observer watching myself as I ride. This Observer-me is somehow connected to a larger reality, this new reality I am now experiencing. The Observer part of me understands what is happening: it understands this larger reality. It is part of that larger reality. My observed-self, the normal everyday me, is confused, not understanding what is happening. The Observer-me then opens a portal and both selves momentarily merge. My combined awareness reaches out and envelops the enormous prairie surrounding me. Perhaps it is the other way around, I think. Perhaps it is Prairie’s awareness enveloping me. Prairie is living, vibrant. I can feel her life-giving power, her energy. I know her. It is an old knowing, reaching back through the eons. I know the prairie grass too, each blade of each plant. We know each other. My awareness grows and senses the presence of other life forms. I experience a oneness with Prairie and each of her inhabitants. Then I become Prairie herself, ancient and old. I become Wind, Ancient Wind, blowing even as creation took place. Moving over the face of Earth. Watching mountain ranges uplift, I am Wind, wearing them down through the ages, molecule by molecule, grain by grain. A moment later the universe shifts back, and I once again feel my separateness. The bike and I become separate; the prairie and I are distinct. I am once again a rider on the wind, an observer moving through the universe. Looking out over the enormous plain that surrounds me, I feel a longing pass over me. So intense and intimate had been my connection with the surrounding prairie, I feel isolated now and lonely in the absence of that connection. Like a child missing his mother, I am somehow cut off from my source of nurturance. Ken is now several miles ahead of me on the horizon. Kicking up the Harley, I close the gap between us. This gap would never really be closed, however. I had taken a different path in my life as of that instant. This would be my last group ride for many years to come, perhaps for this lifetime. In that instant, in that experience with the grassland, I had turned down a different road, a road away from the university and the life I had known as a professor and scientist. I did not understand all this yet. That understanding would come slowly over the next decade as my road diverged further and further from that of my old life. As I ride, I feel the powerful impact of the loss of the connection with the prairie. I feel weak and disoriented. If I had to get off the bike right now, my knees would buckle. My scientific mindset of ordinary reality tries to reassert itself. It is confused, having no context in which to put this experience, nothing to compare to it. Based in my five senses, my old scientific mind could not define or understand this new, multi-sensory reality. Yet, this new reality feels more real to me than the common, everyday one of my senses. Brief flashes of memories from altered-state experiences on drugs or alcohol in my college days pass through my mind. Those feelings of being spaced out on drugs felt nothing like what I have just experienced. There were no drugs, no alcohol. When I ride the bike, I have a cardinal rule against more than one beer and I have long moved on from recreational drugs. The feelings I have just experienced have great clarity. My head is very clear. We ride on to Devil’s Tower. I say nothing to Ken of my experience. This is not Ken’s sort of thing. Hell, it is not my sort of thing for that matter. He is an old Marine, grounded in the solid, practical world. He is cussing the wind as we get off the bikes. I am silent. There is nothing I can say. I have no words that can express my experiences to him. For a man of words, I am at a loss. [I recall an experience from my youth, at the age of 18, and a young woman I was madly in love with at the time, and a kiss that stopped time, stopped the world. It was a kiss that we both felt. It was night, and I was bringing her home from a date. We kissed, and it was as if the rest of the world disappeared, dissolved, vanished. Then we had dissolved too. There was nothing else in the universe but that kiss. It was a kiss that brought me a profound sense of peace but seemed to have frightened her. My experience today on the prairie had some of the same flavor as that kiss. There were some similarities, but many differences too. As much as that kiss was beautiful and sweet, this was so much more mysterious and global, seeming to encompass the whole of the Universe.] At Devil’s Tower there are so many bikers at the visitor center that we do not even try to pull into the parking area, much less the center itself. We content ourselves with taking a few photos of the famous landmark and walking around a little to stretch our legs. By three o’clock in the afternoon we are headed back to Custer. We stop for lunch in Sundance and now are back on US 16. The afternoon has grown warm, and we pull over and remove some of our layers of clothing, using bungie cords to secure them to the back of our bikes. Only a few words are exchanged between us. It seems the quietness of the prairie suits us both right now. Solitude is becoming increasingly important to me. This is solitude at its finest as far as I am concerned. Riding in shirtsleeves now, I let Ken pull out ahead once again. I like following him because he is a cautious driver, and I do not have to be so concerned about what is up ahead with him in the lead. He will warn me if there are any problems. As our ride continues back to Custer, I sink again into reverie about my experience on the grassland. The scientist part of me searches again for an explanation. That part of me is puzzled and confused. It tries to dismiss my experience, searching for physiological explanations. None of these explanations fit. I reject hypothesis after hypothesis. The awakening spiritual side of me tells me this experience is important. There is something very important here to which I need to pay attention. I have been given a great teaching this day, an awakening, even if I do not yet understand its meaning. The spiritual part of me tells me that what I experienced on the grassland, the feeling of oneness, was the direct experience of the interconnectedness of all of nature, of the universe. It is one thing to read objectively about how everything is interconnected. It is quite another to experience subjectively this interconnectedness. Little did I appreciate or understand then that this oneness experience would result in a fundamental transmutation in my understanding of reality and the universe. It opened the door for a whole new perspective on reality. A shift had occurred, a mind shift, and this small shift would dramatically alter my path and my life. From the small crack in my prison door, I had tasted Truth. Its taste was sweet and delicious.
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The next day we joined up with our colleagues from South Carolina to begin our journey back home. Shortly after we returned, I passed the leadership of our Harley group to one of the other members and dropped out of the group. I had learned from the trips to Myrtle Beach and to Sturgis that rallies were not really my “thing.” I liked riding, but I actually liked riding by myself or with one or two other riders. After the experience on the prairies of South Dakota and Wyoming, riding became more and more a way to get in touch with myself. It became more of a spiritual experience. For me the rallies for me were too superficial. They were simply not part of my path. It would be three years before I made another major trip on the Harley—and this would be a solo trip to the Big Bend National Park in far southwest Texas. It would be on a new Harley, a new Heritage Softtail Classic. So many things would happen to my family and me over those three years. Our universe would shift as I moved from science into counseling and had to deal with my own psychological and spiritual issues. As part of these issues, Carol and I would have to confront our own issues as a couple. Then the universe would shift yet again in an even more dramatic way as our children became teenagers and we had to deal with their crises. Life was going to become interesting. Thankfully, we knew none of this was coming. Looking back, I now recognize that my fascination with the Harley and its life style was part of my quest for personal power and an escape from my prison. I was on a journey to reclaim my personal power and freedom. At the time I did not understand the difference between external power and internal power. To me power was power. At that time I could not have put my journey in context as a quest for power. I sensed its freedom, however. The Harley represented external power; it represented freedom. What I was really searching for was to reclaim my authentic, or personal, power. Authentic power is real power; it is freeing. It is the power and freedom to make responsible choices in one’s life, to choose one’s path, and create one’s own reality. Another part of my journey would be into the world of the warrior, a further quest for external power, and into the world of Zen. The ironic twist was that these, too, only helped to move me farther and farther into the world of the spirit and real power. Every path I took moved me further along in my quest. But there are hard ways and less-hard ways to walk that journey. I, of course, took the hard routes. In the end, I could take no wrong turns, but I did take some painful ones. All turns were right; all roads led to the same end. It was just a matter of how long it was going to take me to get there—and how much pain I was going to go through. For me the path of the warrior turned out to be a journey into the mystical world of the warrior, a very spiritual world. I learned how to show up and be present, a lesson taught by both the martial arts and Zen. I had just started karate when I took my trip to South Dakota. The world of Zen was waiting just down the road. Copyright � Darrell G. Yardley, 2000. All rights reserved. |
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