What did he say?

A few weeks ago, Jackie asked me if I’d like to see Eckhart Tolle in person. I said something like “Is he a rapper?”

After that display of my sublime ignorance and a well-deserved shrug of her shoulders, Jackie gave me some facts about the man who commands large audiences and is generally thought of as a particularly adept spiritual teacher.

In 2008, the NY Times called Tolle the most popular spiritual author in the U.S. where his book The Power of Now has sold millions of copies. In 2008, he and Oprah Winfrey participated in ten live webinars that drew thirty-five million people. He became an Oprah favorite in 2016 when he made her list of 100 Super Souls including visionaries and influential leaders. OK, enough already. I didn’t need any more convincing. Oprah did the trick. I had to see him in action.

Not so fast, Jackie warned. To get the full impact of his spoken word, I needed to read his book before seeing him in  person. Sensing that I might conveniently forget her suggestion once I was out of her sight, Jackie immediately dialed up Amazon on her iPhone and downloaded The Power of Now to my Kindle. To her everlasting credit, she’s done this kind of thing before. Tablecloths, exercise pants, shaving kits, and Lou Malnoti frozen pizzas flown overnight from Chicago have miraculously appeared at my doorstep. I’ve learned to be careful with my words and I try to avoid phrases like “Gee, isn’t that nice” or, ”What a handsome shirt”, or especially, “I’ve always wanted something like that.”

Aspiring to even greater status in my sweetheart’s mind, I dutifully started reading. It began with…

When your consciousness it directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realizes its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.

Although it was a book with only one hundred and thirty pages, I was obviously in for a long, hard slog.

I finished my assignment a day before our trip to see the savior in person and, after much soul searching, realized that the primary message of The Power of Now is as simple as 1, 2, 3.

1. Don’t worry about the past, you can’t do anything to change it.
2. Don’t worry about the future, you can’t control it.
3. Live peacefully in the moment

So there. I saved you fifteen bucks on the book and a whole lot more on the live event.

The Saturday evening program was held in the three thousand seat Pasadena Civic Auditorium, a very impressive and costly venue. We planned to stay overnight and had booked a room at the adjacent Sheraton. Arriving at the hotel around five o’clock after an exciting two hour drive from Oxnard, I demonstrated my driving acumen by attempting to park my car in the narrow “Deliveries Only” driveway. Reaching the end of the driveway, I was hemmed in by a unforgiving concrete wall and a massive semi-truck that did not allow for a turn-around. Forced to back all the way up the ramp, I threw caution to the wind, summoned The Power of Now, exited onto Euclid Avenue and made a u-turn that Evel Knievel would have been proud of.

Parking in the hotel lot without further damage to my ego, we registered, and then debated whether to head directly to the hotel bar for an extended stay, or go meekly to our room. Since both Jackie and I are anally compulsive about being on time, we chose the room option. Much to my regret as I would later learn.

Having made ourselves presentable, we walked to the Civic Center and entered the lobby about twenty minutes before showtime. It teemed with people waiting in a drink line that was long enough to reach to the moon and back. Another mob of souls, with too much disposable income, was four deep at the book sale tables where Tolle’s army of credit card swipers withdrew vast sums of money from the ravenous buyers’ Visa cards.

Jackie had promised her daughter, Samantha, that she would get Tolle to sign her book. In response to her cute query about how that might be accomplished, the reaction from the Tolle card swiper was akin to “Are you crazy? He’d be here all-night signing books. Foolish girl.”

At fifteen minutes before showtime, three thousand seats were half empty. They’ll never fill this cavernous hall, I thought. Foolish Fred. Ten minutes later, it was nearly overflowing. People kept coming and were being seated fifteen minutes after the appointed hour. Oblivious to those around them, they were in the Now, peaceful in their tardiness.

Just like the warm-up singer in a Las Vegas showroom, Marianne Williamson appeared on the stage in a stunning off-white pants suit. I thought “Jackie might like that.” But I quickly avoided thinking about it, fearful that my subliminal message might somehow activate Jackie’s Amazon ordering mode. As a suffering second fiddle, people were still being seated while Marianne spoke.

Along with her reputation as another highly respected spiritual leader, Marianne is currently one of a stampeding horde of seekers for the office of the President of the United States. Blithely skipping around the stage, her thirty-minute message boiled down to don’t be a stinker and love your neighbor. Reasonable campaign material I thought, and a vast improvement over the current occupant of the Oval Office.

And then he arrived. A small man of about seventy, he looked a bit like a combination of ET and a Tolkien Hobbit.  He immediately plunked his thin frame onto an over-stuffed chair that my grandmother might have had in her dated living room. He assumed a somewhat stooped pose, admired the flowers next to his chair, and looked out at the audience of nearly three thousand hungry disciples. A large TV screen above his head made him appear even smaller.

He was silent and peaceful, yet he commanded my attention. Then, quietly, he spoke the same words that I had struggled to read in his book. He occasionally told one sentence off the cuff jokes that no one should have laughed at; but they did. He talked about the horizontal plane that we all live on complete with our fears, challenges and never-ending desires. He spoke of the vertical plane that would, if we could comprehend it, allow us to live peacefully in the now.

The thirty minutes passed in a wink. I didn’t learn how to achieve The Power of Now. But I did learn why people buy his books and why they pay to hear him speak. Why he gets a standing ovation before he speaks and another after he’s spoken. But I can’t explain it. Maybe that’s why people keep coming back.

What did you say?

What did you say?

I’d been doing more of that lately. Sitting in restaurants and trying to have a conversation was a challenge. I might as well have been talking to myself.

Casual conversation, even when there were only two of us, was hit or miss. I would have been better off with the kind of signal flags they used to wave at incoming F-14s on an aircraft carrier.

Turning up the volume, either through shouting or groping the TV remote, did as much good as farting in a windstorm.

Volume wasn’t the problem. I heard loud and not-so-loud things but I still couldn’t decipher what was being said. I spent most of my allotted time saying “Pardon me, what did you say?” Or “Come again, I didn’t hear you.” Or I’d pretend I could hear and stupidly say yes, no or maybe so. Turned out it didn’t matter much which expression I picked so long as the question didn’t include religion, politics or my sexual habits.

When any of those sensitive topics was at the core of the conversation, I’d use a different approach. I’d simply nod knowingly. Not up or down as in yes or no. It was more of a shoulder shrug coupled with a slight oblique shift either left or right that seemed to satisfy the listener’s needs. God knows what I had agreed to in the many years I had used this method that I had dubbed the Nodge.

Jackie seemed to tire easily as our evenings together wore on. Our conversations were heavily punctuated with what, huh, and come again? In no uncertain terms, she eventually said “You need a hearing aid.” Unable to resist such an eloquently worded request, I promised to call for an appointment—right away.

In a vain attempt to slow down the inevitable, I decided to do some research. Googling hearing aids produced as many hits as the search term, porn, might have. My initial reaction to scanning the hearing sites that Google had kindly delivered was one of sticker shock. My next reaction was one of bewilderment. Unable to discern obvious differences between various manufacturers and models, I turned from the saturated world of the Internet to my friends.

“You should go directly to Costco. They’re cheaper than anyone”, said Ralph. “And you can spend your wait time cruising the aisles eating the free samples.”

Mike demurred. “Sure they’re cheaper, but they just take a really good hearing aid and dumb it down. Besides, you probably need to buy a dozen of them.  All wrapped in bullet proof plastic that defies you to open them.”

Like a voyeur, I began looking behind people’s ears. Men were easy marks. Women, with their long hair, were a mystery, just like everything else about them. Since much of my time is spent with old people, it seemed as though everyone had hearing aids. The aid-less seemed to be an exception. I began to stop and talk to strangers who seemed quite willing to discuss their march from “What did you say?” to “You don’t need to shout. I can hear you quite well.”

When no one was looking, I’d stand in front of the mirror at the athletic club and stare at my not inconsequential, Dumbo sized ears and wonder what I’d look like with a canoe positioned in what would never again be just a space between my ear and my skull. Being a handsome, debonair bald men, I could not depend on shaggy hair to mask my otolaryngology disability.

Further research seemed useless and Jackie was getting wise to my game. So I decided to end things quickly by offering myself up to our local hearing aid provider. A kind young man in an austere setting took me under his wing. Wanting to justify the upcoming sale of the latest in hearing aid technology, Wayne administered a hearing test.

Feeling much like the Alexandre Dumas character Edmund Dantes in the Chateau d’If prison, I was herded into a not-so-quiet padded cell. Wayne placed a set of headphones long rejected by iPhone users on my head and left the cell. What followed was a series of beeps, some spoken words and a vain attempt on my part to cheat and pass the test. I later learned that no one passes the test.

Never once saying “You need a hearing aid”, Wayne proceeded to dissect the elements of my hearing test. Ten minutes of gazing at graph lines proved that I had lost about half of my high-end hearing capability. Big surprise. The little cilia sensory cells had departed my inner ear and, much like fingers and toes, would not return.

Wayne offered me a selection of devices whose price differences seemed indecipherable. They all looked the same and all seemed capable of Blue-Toothing their way through the world of audio connectivity. With the latest technology, I was but an iPhone app away from nirvana.

Available in various hues of black and white, I selected one that would come closest to my skin color. Like it would fool anyone with half a brain. Special order, of course. Thoughts of running away during that waiting period flitted through my mind. Bending to the inevitable, four days later I returned to Wayne’s place of business where the devices were installed in my receptive ears.

Later that day, I visited my attorney in Ventura. We were alone in his conference room when I heard a phone ring. He seemed to ignore it so suggested he answer it. “Answer what?” he said. It took me awhile to realize that it was my iPhone ringing through my hearing aids. How cool.

Last Sunday twenty of us went to the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. We sat in the nosebleed seats and listened to the LA Philharmonic play Gershwin and Ravel. From ten thousand feet, I could hear the piccolo, a small chime and the clicking of a stick on a block of rosewood. It was so magnificent that I teared up and felt like I did years ago at the opera

All twenty of us went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. It was family style and we passed simple but delicious platters of food around, drank inexpensive red wine and talked freely about the day’s events. I listened and heard the words. I neither nodded nor shrugged.

We got home at nine and Jackie, seeming less tired than usual, said “Thank you for hearing. I love you.”