It was in a bitter December morning just before Christmas when I started to wake up. I was living in a 90s GMC van in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the northwest corner of Reno, Nevada. The chilled air was harsh and dry, and would freeze little rings around the lips of my water jugs. Every day I would go down to the river with my guitar to play and sing for the people passing by with their yipping little dogs, steaming coffee in hand. I played music as a prayer on behalf of all beings on the Earth, or anywhere else, unto the salvation of their souls and the conquest of their sufferings. I played for many hours every day in the hopes of a generous passer-by dropping a dollar or two in my guitar case. I relied on the universe to sustain me, believing this money was given to me like almsfood, mirroring the ascetic training principles given to us by the Buddha. I spent my days in prayer and meditation, and the world gave me back the money to buy my one dollar loaf of bread and my seventy-eight cent jug of water, and so I was sustained. I had read the words of Christ saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” I took this as instruction, that I might come to know just which words do proceed from the mouth of God if I reduced my sustenance to the minimum. If, somehow, I could quiet myself enough, maybe I could hear God whispering to me.
I was lost. The world seemed dark and full of oily shadow. Though I felt great compassion for others, and wanted to dedicate my life to the uplifting of my brethren, I still felt like I was constantly walking with my eyes shaded, only half perceiving reality. My life was filled with scriptures like the Diamond Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Nag Hammadi, the Sepher Yetzirah, but I could not realize the fruits of these practices in my own life. I felt alone and stranded in a world I could hardly relate to, cut off from my spiritual source. I knew that I had to continue my journey, pushing forward, even though each step felt like it would send me in a headlong tumble in to the void. I turned to scripture for answers. I had long ago learned that the patterns of other men’s lives could be applied to my life so that I may benefit, so I took the lives of Buddha and Christ as my guides.
Christ fasted for forty days before he responded to Satan’s suggestion that he turn stones to bread. Buddha lived only on food offered by laypeople, and prior to his enlightenment was said to have been able to sustain himself for a day on a single grain of rice. I decided to bare my spirit to the world, playing on the riverbank, and see if I could live on only what people offered me. After all, Christ had instructed me “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
I just needed to listen. I spent weeks fasting in this fashion, eating only bread, drinking only water, that I might forge a physical token of my sincerity, and that I might discover what it was that a man lives on aside from his bread. I felt darkness looming around me as if I was a light that might be snuffed at any time. I still remained troubled by my father’s death the year before and by the midnight visitation of my Grandfather’s spirit which preceded a horrific commerical truck accident I barely survived. At this point I believed all my moments were simply time borrowed from God and nothing more. I did not feel entitled to life, and felt that I would soon die. It isn’t that I didn’t wish to live, just that I didn’t know how I could continue to live. Surely my life ought to have meaning, dedicated to a worthy cause or purpose. I felt I needed to live in the service of others, to help them, to bring them to enlightenment, but how could I help bring beings to something I clearly hadn’t found myself? How could I help anyone if I couldn’t even help myself?
I was miserable, but in a way it was what I wanted to be, so that I could live up to my ideal of the wise mystic who renounces worldly things and prizes in himself only the spiritual. I felt I was doing a great work on behalf of all beings, sitting, meditating, playing music that might rouse people for a moment from the reverie of their own thoughts. I studied hard every day, poring over the great thoughts of the great spiritual teachers of our world, letting their ideas sink in to my mind, that I might integrate them in some vast mechanism whose cosmic structure I could hardly fathom.
It was while studying the Gospel of Matthew that it occured to me. Christ provided me instructions to ask, to seek, to knock. Certainly I was seeking in my diligent studies, and surely I was knocking in my fasting, but I had not asked. I had not prayed for guidance since I was a child. I had always thought that the answers would come from within, and that seeking guidance might somehow unman me. That it might cheapen my spiritual struggle. That God knew my problems and that He would guide me the righteous way no matter what, so what was the point in asking? I began to realize my arrogance more and more as I studied the life of this Yeshua ben Nazaret who went down in to the waters of baptism with John. I knew then I must humble myself and repent of my hubris, hoping to follow in the examples of Christ and Buddha.
Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, Christ fasted in the desert, and I knelt in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and prayed. I asked God, where is the church? It seemed clear to me that there was much great spiritual truth in scripture from sources all over the world, but that each of those teachings had its own place, its own culture, its own time, and I was doomed to never be able to fully understand the writings of the ancient wise men. If there was a path, where was it? How could I reach it? Must I blaze my own trail and be sealed to a life of ascetic solitude, unable to share my learning with the world?
Something very unexpected happened. With steaming hot tears running down my face in the frozen vehicle, frost coalescing on my breath as I prayed for guidance, asking for anything that could help me to piece together the vast tapestry of my spiritual rumination, I was granted a vision. Maybe I was only delirious from fasting. Maybe it was the cough medicine I was taking to fight back my constant sick cold. Whatever it was, it appeared behind my eyelids like another world had opened up in front of me. I saw myself as the microcosm in the image of God, the Cosmic Man, my spiritual troubles being an echo of the spiritual problems of the world at large. I saw my body from outside myself there in the van, and from somewhere it was asked of me, “Do you want to leave? You’ve made it. You can come home.” A middle-aged Hispanic woman would discover my corpse within a few days, and I was shown what the aftermath would be. The morbidly curious, the passersby, a short investigation of a nobody drifter living in a van with his guitar, dead at the age of 26.
I thought then that I had no reason to stay. I love my family very much, and I love my music, but the world is so difficult, why should I stay? I don’t belong here anymore. I am not needed. I can move on. I remembered in a flash a thing I had sworn long ago: that I would not leave this place until I was able to bring salvation to the beings that lived here with me. So many people were still here suffering. I could not leave them. I had a mission to pray on their behalf, to comfort them. To play my music for them, that their souls may be soothed, and that they may pass easily in to the next world.
I was then shown that I could be resurrected. I could be brought back to the world to help these people. I was filled with joy, and I knew this is what I had to do. I had to return to the people and somehow help them so I asked, “Dear God, how can I help these people? What guidance can I use, when I have found no sure-footed path?” Before me was set an image of a blue book with gold letters on the cover, inscribed “The Book of Mormon.” I began to think things were taking a ridiculous turn. I had received a Book of Mormon from a high school friend but on that day, after opening it, had promptly shut it again at the artistic depiction of Samuel the Lamanite on the wall. It disagreed with everything I thought I knew about the world. Clearly it couldn’t be right.
Then it was shown to me a diagram, of a square and a hexagon side by side. It was proposed to me by some unknown voice that the square represented the Gospel as it was in the books of the New Testament, and the Hexagon represented the Gospel as it was in the Book of Mormon. The question was posed: are these two things the same, or are they different?
“Clearly different,” I said, confident in my answer. They don’t line up at all. Superimposing the hexagon on the square does not make them reconcilable.
And then the image turned, to reveal that both the square and the hexagon were just aspects of a cube. I had supposed they could not align because I did not understand the dimensions on which I was speaking. I had supposed two dimensions when there was a third dimension all along. How much more the infinite dimensions of the Divine, related to our scriptures and Gospels? Just like a two dimensional drawing cannot truly depict a three dimensional object, but only give an impression of three dimensions through creative illusions and rendering techniques, so too do our scriptures only give us an impression of higher dimensional divine truths, through creative illustration and storytelling.
At this point information began pouring in to me, filling me with insight in to our world as a divine academy, giving me understanding of our divinity together, of our creation in the image of God, of the building and importance of the Temple, of the coming Kingdom, and on and on. I could fill a great amount of space with all the things that were shown to me therein. I was overwhelmed.
“OK,” I thought when I woke up the next morning to find myself thankfully alive, “I guess I’ll have to find a Book of Mormon. Maybe at the library. Maybe later this week.” Not knowing what else to do, I went down to the river to play music for my daily bread. I had a pretty slow day and I began to pack my stuff in, when a voice came from behind me asking “What kind of guitar is that?” I turned around to find a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I didn’t want to tell them about the vision I had had, because I thought surely no one would believe me, but I played a few songs for them and talked with them a little while before finally asking them for a copy of the Book of Mormon. Finally I’d have the opportunity to read this book.
Far from being convinced by my vision, I took to the Book of Mormon with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that would let me discard it and the vision I had had as nonsense, but the more I tried the more I had to concede that the points it was making were good, and that my protests were out of ignorance more than anything. I began to meet with the missionaries often, gradually telling the story of my vision and what I had seen. I slowly began to learn of a church that taught things as I had come to understand them through years and years of dedicated study. I had thought that certainly there was a life before this one, as I had come to experience past life recollections from my Buddhist practices, but I had never remembered being a different person. I believed in what Christ taught himself, but it seemed to me that no apostolic line had truly survived the fractures in the early church. I had come to believe that this world is a kind of school or academy where we come to spiritually learn, and that we came here of our own volition in order to study and grow. When I would explain what I had seen, the missionaries would often just look at eachother and smile.
I began to learn about such things as the Word of Wisdom, which proscribes against drinking alcohol, coffee, tea, or tobacco. As someone who indulged in all of those things before, I was a bit resistant. Despite my ascetic practices, I didn’t actually want to give up so much of what kept me functioning at a reasonable level of contentment. Alcohol in particular was a big part of the culture surrounding my music performances. I began to think that it wasn’t doing me any favors, and conceding that it was perhaps the wisest path, I resolved to quit for the New Year.
Early in the morning of December 31st, after playing a raucous show and drinking with some new-found companions, I was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Strangely enough, it was a positive experience. I spent four days in the Washoe County Jail on Parr Blvd in Reno, Nevada, because the judges had all taken time off for the holiday. I was assigned for my short stay cell number 33, which I noted to be the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified and resurrected.
I had a worried little cellmate named Jacob, who was a habitual methamphetamine user wh0 was in for a related charge. He wanted nothing more than to talk about Jesus and how he planned to turn his life around while nervously discussing his prospects at receiving serious jail time for the possession of methamphetamine. We asked for Bibles but could not get them. Instead we spent the days talking about who Christ was and what he did, and all the great teachers of the world. We discussed religions great and small, and I told Jacob about mythologies of cultures long since past in to history. I read Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game in between our discussions of Christ’s works and the histories of various churches. He seemed to light up at the subject, nuzzling up to it like an old cat to a warm quilt.
On the fourth morning, I woke up and saw him with tears in his eyes, a ray of sunlight beaming through our small slit of a window on to his face. “I heard a voice calling my name,” Jacob said, “I know he forgives me for what I’ve done.” I didn’t know what to say, but I thought that the power of Christ as redeemer had been able to touch that man’s soul that day and I told him so. I was amazed to be witness to the phenomena of grace descending on a man. Soon, the deputies came to take me to court. With tears streaming down his face, Jacob hugged me as I left and said, “I know he sent you to me. Thank you. Thank you.”
I knew then why I had come to Earth, and why I stay here now, and what my work is in this world. I saw a glimpse of my part in the coming kingdom, and I knew that it was worth it. The love and compassion we can have for all other beings, to uplift them and save them from the depths of misery, is worth every moment of suffering we endure to be able to touch the lives of others.
I know that my redeemer lives, and that his name is Jesus Christ. I testify this in his sacred name. Amen.