Nomali's mention, in her GAIA blog, of car lights watched from a balcony brought on a memory of a turning point in my spiritual practice.

I'd like to remember someone who must remain anonymous here.

It was a Hosan, a day ‘off' in a Zen monastic schedule. Hitch hiking from a monastery to a mosque just after sundown, I was given a lift by a man in crisis.

After I said something about Zen practice being a way of working with the problem of life and death he took a sharp breath in, held it, then released it in a sigh, an opening up. He struggled with a question, begining to say something in halting pauses, shifted in his seat, loosened his tie, looked at me...

He'd been drinking. We were speeding down the highway. He asked, "What would you say if I told you I was going to buy a gun tonight, kill my girlfriend, wait until cops come and kill myself ? " (His despondency, it came out, had been triggered by being dumped by a girlfriend who's family rejected him due to his racial appearance.) Gauging whether his statement was b.s. or if it revealed a scenario with any traction in the stream of his deciding... Over the next hour I took him figuratively into the next day, alluding to impacts, the headlines, the story, the rippling of effects...

Raising my voice like I'd known and loved him forever, laying into him with a fierce yet playful inquiry: who-are-you-really, why-are-you-alive... Again and again falling silent into vigilant attentiveness to his presence and process, riding core into circumstance, calibrating the tack taken with him to the movements in his re-orientation, leaving him in his own power at every step, not imposing outcomes, holding space into which he might arrive at his own dignity and grok his inseparability from the whole catastrophe... sharing my perspective...

Relaying this episode to my Roshi, Daido affirmed, "That's the transmission of the Buddha Dharma!". Telling my Sheikh about that sequence of events, they were attributed to being a vessel of Hu . That ride made a good case for all that sitting still in the quiet of the dawn, all that entrainment in a 700 year old lineage born at a crossroads of civilizations. Careening down an interstate with drunken homicidal suicidal despair at the wheel are also exquisite ornaments arising in awareness.

As we approached a huge suspension bridge with the long sweep of car lights rising into the night, a metaphor presented. I asked if he recalled Jacob's Ladder from the Old Testament, the image of angels ascending and descending. In the sight before us all the lights on the this side were red, on the other, all bright white.

 

"Look at these demons! climbing out of hell. Look at those angels coming this way! It may look like your life sucks... but look again. In every case there's no demons or angels, only a person at the wheel!"

Cresting the peak of the span and coasting to pause at the toll, his energy stirred, overflowed, and leveled off. Relaxed with a voice of relief he said, "I'm gonna call my brother. He'll put me up tonight."

The way I was able to be with him had been modeled for me repeatedly by spiritual teachers. That's something I wrote of in a recent comment on Nomali's blog. "...the quality of teachers who are able to help save our lives from the treacherous spots of the Left Hand excursions. The dangers on the Left are equally perilous, the views, just as stunning." 

Without the gifts of the spiritual traditions, the long proven methods of praxis, and systems of evolutionary learning, where we would be at this point we will never know. The contributions to universal quality of life made via the influence of wisdom teachings may be untracable, but I wouldn't be surprised if we owe most of what we value dearly to the anonymous gestures of applied spirituality.