But, if we were able to overcome sectarian divisions, nevertheless we argued from the start and vehemently. I believed there was a lot of truth - blended with delusion - in the experience that sent him to the hospital. I didn’t believe in anything to do with the telepathy he mentioned, but something had definitely happened to give him an extraordinary metaphysics: original, highly sophisticated, and in some areas, just plain wrong.
Our ongoing tension peaked only three hours into that longest, most intense day, when I had God on the phone. Afternoon sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window. He was slumped in a chair, too exhausted for impersonations. I was in the same condition. We were both snappish and argument was crescendoing toward violence.
“No!” he spat and leapt from his chair into the middle of the room. “You don’t understand . . .”
“I think I do. I just don’t agree . . .” He reached toward me with a rhetorical hand gesture while launching into another foray, but I cut him off. “I think the experience, as you’re describing it, is fundamentally identical to satori in Zen. You say it isn’t, but you haven’t produced a single fundamental difference.”
He sat down, ready to engage me face to face, somewhat more conciliatory.
But I continued, “I understand your vision of dyadic change as opposed to dialectical change. Theses, antithesis, and instead of synthesis, intervention of God in history through scattered visionaries. That’s it, right?”
“Yes, but . . . “
“So I understand it. I just disagree when you say it is unprecedented. I think that it is compatible with Hegelian dialectics. You say it isn’t, but you can’t make the case. So…”
I gave him the airwaves but instead he pondered what I was forcing him to face. I had him and we both knew it.
There was always more at stake than our egos, though they were never absent. During that particular historical moment, the Sixties, the mind lay open on the operating table. It seemed mankind, and Dan and I, had an opportunity to shift the foundations of thought.
“Look,” he began with his best salesman’s agreeability, “I’m not saying that dyadics contradicts dialectics. It subsumes it. Redefines it. It doesn’t negate it. Like satori. Western mystical experience doesn’t negate satori, it just subsumes it, includes it in a broader context of historical change. History is not an illusion. There is scientific evidence. Look, when a fetus is developing, there are opportune moments which, if they’re lost, can’t be made up…“
“But that denies the infinite nature of satori,” I said, cutting him off again. “It’s outside of time.”
His expression soured. And here he blundered: he mistook convincing me for being right. He was constantly trying, subtly and unsubtly, to bend me into a disciple. Also, there was something crucial to the integrity of his vision that demanded it be unprecedented. And he now felt driven to intimidating me into submission. He leaned in close.
“Look,” he hissed, “I’ve been given the Magic Sword to protect the Rose . . .”
“I don’t doubt the authenticity of your vision. It’s just … I don’t think you’re articulating it well.”
Just inches from mine, his purple-pink face was moist from sweat and tensed for action. I could feel his body heat. That close, that intense, was an undeniable physical threat.
“Maybe . . .” he said, “you . . . can’t . . .hear it.”
We teetered an instant on the edge. Coming from rednecks, I learned early how to face down a bully. I stayed still, unyielding but relaxed. He was no church-mouse mystic but tremendously energetic, playing pickup basketball every weekend with teenagers at the school across from his house. I decided if he made a move, I would hit him with the chair next to me.
“If it’s beyond someone like me,” I asked quietly, “then who’s going to understand your book?”
That deflated him. He realized what he had done and felt embarrassed and slumped back into his chair.
