In April of the year 1968, on the occasion of my birthday (see), I went to visit the site of my childhood attempt at manned flight using a machine based on a Leonardo Da Vinci design. Twenty years before, with the help of my uncle, I had constructed a winged, glider-like contraption the two of us thought would easily carry a person (me) in flight over a substained distance. Although my uncle never said anything about actually trying out the device, without his sanction I hauled it out of the garage and up to the top of the two story apartment house across the street, and hanging on for dear life, jumped off. On page three of ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds I describe the results of that attempt:
"Initially the flight played out fairly well, picking up wind under the wings and maintaining the same two-story height advantage for some distance. Halfway across busy Arlington Street though, the craft began slowing and losing forward momentum. It began dropping altitude rapidly, eventually crashing into the porch and partway through the front windows of the house across the way. Other than a few bruises and a wrecked machine, nothing was broken, although as it turned out, my dad wasn't nearly as proud of me as intended. I never forgot the thrill of that flight and carried that thrill and Leonardo's dreams into my adulthood."
Please note the mention of "Arlington Street" in the above quote. As a young boy with several years growing up in and around the so-called Adams District of Los Angeles, of which encompassed Arlington Street where it crossed Adams, there was an exclusive gated area called Berkeley Square and close by, near the corner of Western and Adams, a huge bricked in compound where some guy had his own private domed observatory. When I went back twenty years later seeking out my infamous two-story high Arlington Street launch site, I discovered that the Santa Monica Freeway, which didn't exist when I was a kid, ran eight or more full lanes wide right through the old neighborhood, completely wiping out Berkeley Square and other houses for blocks around.
To find what I was looking for I had to drive all over the place searching out old landmarks. In doing so the most unusual thing happened. As Karma and conditions would have it, on that exact same day as I was circling around in my car trying to find someplace I recognized, I turned on a street called Cimarron. In doing so I accidently came across the official first-day opening of the Rinzai-ji Zen Center, as part of the 61st birthday of Joshu Sasaki Roshi. At the time I was one year away from the events described in Dark Luminosity but heavy into study-practice. Stumbling across a Zen center right in the middle of a now somewhat pretty much dilapidated former shadow of itself crumbling area on the west side of Los Angeles was so unexpected that I had to stop and go in. I had studied under Yasutani Hakuun Roshi a few years before --- without much success I might add --- and had some experience with Zen protocol, and as an outsider amongst mostly regulars or the uninitiated, noticed quite quickly. In the process I was introduced briefly to the Roshi, then continued on my journey.
I only bring it up because years later I was waiting between trains at the Union Sation in Los Angeles and decided to dash across the street to Olvera Street for tacquitos. A man that I knew at one time, who it was quite clear was now homeless and had fallen on hard times, stepped up to me and we started talking. I contacted a friend that attended the Zen Center on occasion to see if he could help the man. He did. Apparently the homeless man turned his life around after awhile. I heard from good sources that he attained a state of immortality. (see)
If you go to the "see" link just after "on the occasion of my birthday," at the top of the page and compare the photo of the DATE etched into the cement at the Grauman's Chinese Theater with the birthday of the Zen Center Roshi and the center's opening date listed in the History link of the center, you will get the connection.
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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