One summer day in 1990 I was walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California when a fellow with the appearance of a street person confronted me. He had very dark sunglasses on and a large head of curly brown hair and a big frizzy beard. An explosion-of-color tie-dye t-shirt, jeans, an unbuttoned jean jacket, and worn tennis shoes covered most of his muscular body. He moved with an ease that belied the idea that he belonged to the downtrodden classes, and was way too clean for the first impression to be true. I tried to go around him but he sidestepped, confronting me with a secretive grin, and continuing to block my way. I came to a complete stop and gave him a penetrating look, undecided on my next course of action. At that moment he chimed out:

“When without is within,
and you have that silly silly grin,
you must be a student of rDzogchen!”

The Dennis was completely stunned. If an asteroid had smacked into the pavement twenty meters in front of me I could not have been more shocked. The Tibetans call this state “hedowa” and this strange fellow had put me in it with a short unexpected rhyme, full of insight. A calm silence, saturated with awareness, set in. The passing whirl of a busy street went into slow motion and became poignant, bathed in synesthesia.

“How could you possibly know I am a student of rDzogchen?” I managed at last.

“How could I not know?” he shot back without hesitation. “Doesn’t the light of pure awareness illuminate everything? Can the sun shine on the chosen ones…but not the rest of humankind? We are here in God’s playground are we not? Is it lila or maya?”

“Both.” I answered definitively, “for sure.”

“Is this a real street? In a real town?”

I looked at the people streaming past us toward the UC campus. They were strangely quiet, as though someone had hit the mute button on their chattering lives. I had the feeling I was a character in a Bunuel film, everything was surreal.

“Real. In a certain real way, real.” I replied emphatically.

“Oh really?” he responded wryly. “Maybe you had best take another look.”

I turned toward the drugstore that we were standing in front of, just a few meters away. It was gone and in its place was a wall of foliage, a lush steaming jungle from some other climate. I could smell hot grass and hear the incessant chirping of innumerable unseen insects. Far away some large animal roared.

Turning back to my questioner without much surprise I added, “and unreal too.”

He was gone and an Indian sadhu stood in his place, clothed only in a dhoti and a few loose colored threads that ran diagonally across his chest from the left shoulder down to the right waist area. His eyes were bloodshot wild and his hair matted, he leaned forward on a massive cudgel, which possibly doubled as a walking stick, staring defiantly at me. He rocked a bit and I became aware of gnarly bare feet that were half covered by a golden dust which covered most of the packed red clay of the path ahead. I was suddenly aware of the stifling heat. It was an effort to draw a breath and each one seemed to sear my lungs. I was fighting for oxygen and felt as though I was about to pass out.

“Where are you going? And why?” the sadhu took a threatening step toward me.

These questions, these simple questions, cut through all levels of my self-definition. I realized in that instant the falseness of who I was, the falseness of who I thought I was, the falseness of who my family thought I was, the falseness of who the world thought I was. As the hammer of this realization came down on my little overworked head I sank to the ground in despair. As I sank I realized that I was naked and scrawny and had a dark brown skin. Before I could fully take this in my knees hit the earthen path and in an instant the scenery was sucked away as though by an enormous vacuum cleaner, or a celestial in-breath. Head spinning, I realized that I was on my knees on a sidewalk in Berkeley again, fully clothed in my normal outfit of casual cottons. I was panting. I struggled to get up, still a bit unfocused.

“Take your time,” the hairy one said. “When you get up we will take a walk.”

My world had just been taken apart. My idea of who I was had just been taken apart. Yet my immediate concern was to get off the street and quit making a fool of myself.

“Relax,” he continued, as though my petty concerns were completely obvious, “These passers-by will not remember you one hour from now. This is Berkeley, after all!”

I smiled weakly and got to my feet. Having petty concerns just accentuated my sense of personal falseness and stupidity.

He took my elbow and guided me down the block to some street chairs in front of a coffeehouse.

“Sit down,” he commanded, “Do you want some coffee?”

“In a bit,” I replied, “Let me gather my alleged world back together first.”

“Oh no! Do not bother to even try. It is shattered and gone forever!”

“Oh really! And to whom do I owe this…this gift?”

“To your maker I imagine. Are you made in his image?”

I smiled. “I was asking your name, in my own, uncareful way.”

“Ah, I see! Daniel is the name I use.”

“Daniel, you have a great disguise.”

“Well yes, but consider this…without this disguise you wouldn’t see anything at all.”

“Hmmmmmmmmm. I guess you are right!” and I laughed with him.

“There is the ah. The aha. And the Maha Aha!” he continued and I laughed with him again.

“Well I think I just had the Maha Aha,” I replied, “and I am sure that you are right, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot possibly put me back together again. Can you?”

“Wouldn’t even try,” he replied. “Would not even try.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Not enough material to work with.” He answered and we laughed again. It was wonderful to laugh with this strange man with his cutting insightful humor. “Or too much material to work with! And, to be honest, it all sounds like a lot of work.”

“If I keep asking you though, eventually you must say yes. Is that not right?”

He turned to me, apparently staring through those dark, dark glasses, replied, “Yes. But you do not know me well enough to ask anything yet.”

“I know that you shattered my reality back there.”

“Could be a cheap trick. Give it some time.”

“Okay. I will.” And I went into a momentary brood while he brought a pack of cigarettes out. The idea that he smoked took me aback.

“See.” He noted, as he shook a cigarette out of the soft pack, “I told you, you did not know me.”

“I am going to have a breve cappuccino,” I stated, standing up. I was suddenly in a hurry to buy myself a few private moments. “Can I get anything for you?”

“Nope.” He replied, obviously amused.

I went inside and got my cappuccino. It took about five minutes and when I came back out he was nowhere to be seen. I set down at “our” table and waited about an hour while I drank my coffee. I was hoping Daniel would return, but there was a real edge of fear that he would also. What would I say to him? Would I have to give up who I was? Wasn’t that what I had long wished to do? What if he took drugs also? I had a lot of ideas about what my teacher looked like, and, even more importantly, how he behaved, and this Daniel did not live up to either. So how did he fit into my life? And what about the experience I had had earlier? Was it legitimate? I went back over it in detail. I had a lot of questions for this Daniel person, but they were going to have to wait until I saw him again, if I saw him again, if he was even a real person. He certainly seemed mythic or fictional. Perhaps he just stopped by this reality to give me a wakeup slap.