Part I: Dukkha and Darshana

Chapters 1 through 10

1

By the end of 2006, the author James Frey had become America’s national distraction, his visage to be found glimmering nightly on the evening news, sandwiched between stories of the war in Iraq and Iran’s nuclear ambition.

There was Iraq, Iran, and James Frey.

A website called The Smoking Gun had called Frey out, for fabricating certain events of his life, in his bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Following, the television personality Oprah Winfrey, who had selected the book for the Oprah Book Club (and in so doing taken the first time author under her wing), confronted him in front of her live audience. Sitting across from Winfrey, Frey sat surprised and bewildered, unable to do much but suffer the humiliation.

The country’s President, it had become clear at this particular moment in history, had rallied the nation to war on false pretense. But the lie the people found beyond the pale was that of the Memoirist. At the time, the irony went unnoticed.

The nation had had a moment of Truth, but what was this Truth found?

2

Since the the late 1990s, I have founded, with various partners, we, a collection of souls behaving at times talented and inspired, at others flummoxed and flawed, six companies and two non-profits, each of these enabled by technology, each innovative, groundbreaking, if all not ultimately lasting.

These startups, ideas become structured, real, provided me (an amateur, a novice, something of a dilettante even, a culture hacker of sorts) entrance, via silicon-gilded back-doors, into the varied industries, worlds unto themselves, of technology, film, television, video games, toys, education, healthcare, retail, marketing and advertising and spectacle.

As if by magic, enabling experimentation, creation, play.

Over the years, my work has been featured by most every major domestic news organization: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, PBS and Fox News. I have been on the covers of magazines, once photographed by the late icon Helmut Newton; featured in The Hollywood Reporter’s “35 Under 35”; declared by GQ as “Man of the Month.”

My combined endeavors have attracted hundreds of millions in capital and revenue, and put me in financial relationship with a raft of investors both virtuous and vile: sought-after Silicon Valley venture capitalists; famous Hollywood directors, producers, and talent agency heads; mighty media and technology executives; loaded hedge-fund quants and mortgage-peddling Goldman Sachs VPs; con men.

And in creative relationship with all variety of artists and technologists and builders.

I’ve done business on every continent save Africa and Antarctica, and called home four apartments in New York City, two houses in Wellington, New Zealand, three flats in San Francisco, a villa in Los Angeles, a Victorian cottage in Colorado, and a beach house in a little town called Stinson Beach, California.

I’ve lived with six different women, having been engaged to two, one of these three times.

It’s been a ride, adventurous, evolving, unconventional. And, fundamentally, changing, always changing.

As I reflect back, on this life, and career, viewed either as successful or failed, I can’t help but think, that I’ve missed the point.

3

Frey’s story of a drug and alcohol riddled young man, determined to overcome the power of his addiction, refusing a prescribed (twelve-step) path, choosing instead to forge his own way, resonated with addicts, their families, and non-addicts alike.

A profound reflection on the nature of addiction, A Million Little Pieces got right to the root of addiction, which Frey called “the Fury”: that feeling that we all, to some degree or another, have inside us, the feeling that things are not okay. Everything is not okay. Something is wrong. Something hurts. Something gnaws. Something terrifies.

For the addict in Frey’s book, the Fury ravishes and rampages, as a darkness feeding, disturbing peace, preventing joy, requiring, needing, needing, needing. How to stop the Fury? For Frey’s character, feed it drugs, feed it alcohol. Quench it. Make it go away.

Stop the Fury.

The Fury: is precisely “the Horror” that Joseph Conrad wrote of in The Heart of Darkness, to which Brando gives voice in Apocalypse Now.

The Horror: the emptiness, fear, pain, anxiety, loneliness that sits within, manifest as doubt, regret, self-judgement, self-hatred.

A Million Little Pieces resonated with so many because it described in vivid and often brutal fashion a dis-ease endemic to our human condition.

I have no significance. I have no meaning. I have no value. I have nothing to contribute. I have no love.

Before he was flayed and flogged, Frey had become beloved. The meaning and power of the words he wrote were bound up not in the memoir’s events having happened or not, but in the elemental Truth the story conveyed:

The Horror…

4

As forge…

This is not an uncommon story.

Recently arrived in New York City, 1995, age 27, I awoke early on a December morning, alone, to snow falling, the first of the year, trees, steps, sidewalks, streets blanketing white.

Kirsten, she, soulmate, hadn’t come home: no word at all. I knew she was okay, but, likely, nothing else.

That snowy December morning, the end, and beginning.

I knew not of what.

5

One need not be an addict to know the Horror. In some fashion, we’re, most every one of us, looking for, latching onto some route or routes out of various kinds of emotional pain.

So, perhaps it might be useful to soften the word a bit, to make it more accessible. Most simply, the Horror might be understood as thoughts and emotions that disturb our state of being, bring us down, take us away from the enjoyment of our lives.

Let’s call it suffering.

It’s the universal experience of suffering that Frey explored so well, which resonated so deeply.

6

A year and half prior to that New York December, I sat proofreading my own words, flickering and faded black and white on a thick grey MacIntosh laptop screen, ensconced in the main library of the Graduate Theological Union, an ecumenical collection of graduate-level theological institutions, perched together on a hill overlooking the north edge of the University of California, Berkeley.

My thesis, Dreams and Liberation, explored the role that dreams and dreaming might play in ascertaining a universal Truth within the relativity of a postmodern world. Its submission to and acceptance by the GTU concluded my work on a Master of Arts in Systematic and Philosophical Theology.

Soon after, I descended “Holy Hill” with a suitcase of books, another of clothes, and set out on my way to Vienna, Austria. There, I planned to stay with a friend, to situate to write, to extend my thesis into what I imagined would be a layperson’s book, a popular non-fiction title.

My flight from San Francisco landed in Amsterdam, where I proceeded to get exceedingly high on exceedingly potent pot for five days. I spent much of the time with two American river guides, judging their physical prowess in, with the natural world to be categorically more meaningful than, superior to my own chosen path, navigating so many thoughts, words alone.

I staggered out of that quiet, canal- and smoke-filled city, on the train to Vienna, dazed and confused, convinced of the futility, not only of my book idea, but of the entirety of my past two and half years time.

I was 25.

7

The world’s major religions begin with, find as their foundation, the problem of suffering, each offering a framework explaining its existence.

The monotheistic triad of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam cohere in their teaching that humanity is fallen, cast from paradise, set apart (alienated) from God, and in need of salvation.

Hinduism similarly instructs that humanity’s inherited state is lacking, that we must move from a life bound by illusion (maya) towards freedom in liberation (nirvana).

Daoism elucidates the “mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders,” which individual seekers must discover in order to escape the travail of a life filled with tumult and dissatisfaction.

But none so succinctly as Buddhism, whose saint and sage spoke explicitly of dukkha, a sanskrit word commonly translated as “suffering,” “anxiety,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” “I taught,” said the Buddha, “one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha.”

Dukkha…

Let’s call the Horror…

Dukkha…

Commonly translated as…

Suffering…

Anxiety…

Unsatisfactoriness…

Dukkha.

Who can’t relate to that?

8

My experience of dukkha began percolating in Vienna.

Confidence shattered in Amsterdam, my plan to write sucked out the train’s window as it glided silently through France or Germany, I arrived Vienna, my chosen destination, lost.

I spent time wandering throughout that beautiful, most grand of cities, which felt to me of course old, but also somehow dead, emotionally flat, or, rather, past, its time of glory, its era of innovation, the fin de siecle, the time of Freud and Wagner, come and now long gone.

I rode metro trains, hot, crowded, filled with the sounds of Austrian German, to my ear then a most unpleasant, guttural kind of rasping, and visited museums, enjoying the art and air conditioning alike. I found respite in the city’s myriad and wonderful parks, abounding with statuary large and small, overflowing with monuments to a history triumphant. Fresh from Berkeley, California, I took to doing yoga in these public green spaces, and gathered quickly, from the bemused faces of adults and children alike, that Austrians didn’t often behold such a site.

I trained to Prague, which seemed what I imaged Paris in the 1920s must have been, full of artistic, young American expats paying nothing for lodging, writing and painting and socializing, enjoying a safe otherness.

And Budapest, a city I found more interesting, its women the most beautiful I’d ever encountered, its atmosphere an exotic combination of West (Buda) and East (Pest). I had a memorable night there, drinking and roaming with a fellow from Northern Ireland. He claimed to fight with the Irish Republican Army. I wanted to fight him, to learn how to fight through him. I didn’t know how to fight. I should know how to fight, I thought, a man needs to know how to fight. He said, “hit me.” I offered the most feeble of punches to his stomach. He laughed an Irish laugh.

9

There it lies, dukkha, at the beginning of each of the world’s major religions, unmistakably, undeniably, unavoidably.

Likewise, the psychotherapeutic traditions begin with dukkha, and prove their worth in their ability to ameliorate it. Freud, the atheist “father of psychoanalysis” and onetime king of the kingdom of intellectual Vienna at its height, posited that religion serves as a means of returning us to an undifferentiated “oceanic feeling” of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity, which we necessarily lose as our perception develops from that of the undifferentiated infant to the ego-delineated adult.

So too for the healing arts, from massage to energy work to yoga, which seek to provide relief from the suffering and anxiety and unsatisfactoriness that persist in daily life.

And, of course, the vast psycho-pharmaceutical industry exists to provide easy palliatives to the more medicinally inclined.

The problem of dukkha, the persistence of the Horror, is that which James Frey explored, articulated. It pointedly is why the phenomenal popularity of A Million Little Pieces was and remains so important. It surfaced a vast resonance with dukkha amongst a very large swath of American society. This culture that so prides itself on the attainment and exhibition of “happiness” fell in love with a book about its opposite, the Horror, and one man’s chosen route out of it.

When it came to light that Frey had embellished his tale, that perhaps, in fact, he had not experienced the Horror he so artfully recounted, the country was aghast, as if to say, “You don’t feel our pain, James?”

This was the nature of his crime. Through sharing his experience of dukkha, Frey opened the country up to recognizing, acknowledging suffering in their own lives. By feeling and expressing it himself, he gave America the okay to feel it and express it as well.

And he went further, to inspire with his example of overcoming. He showed there was a Way.

When it surfaced that Frey perhaps had made it all up, the nation felt tricked and betrayed. Opened and vulnerable, it pounced on him in a feat of collective self-protection.

But the Truth remained, and remains.

10

After a few months traipsing in and around Vienna, I retreated west, to Ireland, to reunite with Arlene, my love during graduate school, recently moved from San Francisco to pursue a Masters Degree in Women’s Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

A smart, kind woman, something of a Nicole Kidman look alike, fair skinned, loose red curls flowing, Arlene admired and adored me, loved me. We spent a lovely summer of 1994 together in Dublin and throughout the ever beautiful evergreen and either-grey or -blue (depending on how the weather painted the sky) Irish countryside.

While there, I thought to begin waiting tables. It seemed an easy way for an American abroad to earn money. A new restaurant group at the time was making a name for itself in Dublin, opening “continental” style establishments in what then was still a quite traditional Irish city. The transition from pub fare to more sophisticated European cuisine just beginning, I thought they’d be they’d be right choice. I concocted a resume portraying myself as experienced, practiced for a few days balancing plates on forearms, and managed to land a gig at the Harbormaster, a new restaurant, soon-to-be-opened in the refurbished, original old stone Harbormaster Building, located at the center of what would become, years later, the Irish Tiger’s financial district.

Just a few months out of graduate school, just turned 26, my Waiting Period had begun.