It was a cool night in San Francisco, foggy but not too dense, and a certain magic was in the air. I was 18 years old and waiting for the last bus heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge. The bus was scheduled to arrive at 11:42 PM.
I waited on the corner under the streetlamp so I would not be missed by the driver. I could see it approaching, but the bus looked full. I worried the driver would think there wasn’t room for me. I stood out a little further into the light, leaning off the curb and waving my arm with my skateboard in my hand, making sure I was seen. Oh, he saw me all right, but as I feared, the bus looked very full. As it went by, I could see plenty of standing room in the back of the bus. People prefer to stand in the aisle right behind the driver. I have been on the bus when the driver tells people to move back and they just refuse to listen. It was late. The driver was probably tired of telling grown men and women to make room for others, so he did not stop for me. It was sad to see people so stuck in their own perspectives, that they didn’t think about the guy on the corner trying to catch the bus too. Witnessing such a grand example of disconnectedness was far sadder than not catching the bus.
Just then a peculiar thing happened. I was not frustrated or angry, I was not stressed or upset. Instead, I was happy. This night was magical. The combination of the ocean breeze, the illumination of the streetlights, the almost complete quiet–but with subtle, constant sounds of the city all around–felt serene. The compassion I had for the driver allowed me to forgive him effortlessly. I had just missed the last bus going home, but somehow, I found myself not concerned at all with what would happen next. Instead I felt oddly content with being right there at that bus stop. I jumped onto my skateboard and popped a smooth flip trick in the middle of the street, my feet landing on the board right over the bolts. The four wheels of my board hit the ground with a loud “CLACK.” My skin tingled from the vibration of the chunky asphalt under my wheels, from the “POP” of my tail and the loud “CRACK” as I ground my trucks down on the gritty curb.
Those sounds were music to my ears as they echoed across the street and bounced off the large two-story Victorian apartments on each side of Lombard Street. The bus stop was perfect for skateboarding: it was well lit, it had slick curbs to grind, a middle divider between the lanes to wallride, and patches of smooth asphalt for practicing flat ground tricks. It was like I had a skatepark all to myself in the middle of the night. Since I was enjoying myself, I figured I would stay awhile.
Just then, a voice unlike my own Spoke firmly but softly, kindly but serious, but also not speaking to me, I felt as if something was channeling through me, so I allowed it to speak through me and what it said was, “Well I guess I have another ride home tonight.” I was quite surprised by the mysterious yet familiar voice, and the words I spoke for it. I did not know what to think. The thought passed through my mind like a feather floating away into the wind. Not forgetting what had just happened, but staying with the moment, I jumped back on my board and skated the bus stop with vigor.
I fell right into a state of perfect flow, a feeling like I was a river flowing through the earth effortlessly, my path carved out in front of me without a worry of where I was going. I practiced grinding the curbs back and forth, I slapped a huge wallride on the middle divide in the street, the “SLAP” of the wooden board popping off the wall was so crisp I can still hear it like it was yesterday. I landed trick after trick. I even landed a new trick I had been working on for some time.
Skating for me was meditation practice in its purest form. It always connected me to the present moment. I did not have a worry about where I was going or how I would get there. If I had my skateboard, I was fine no matter what. I considered for a moment how far I could get trying to skate home, and then remembered the voice that spoke through me assuring me I had a ride home. I laughed out loud, still uncertain of what to make of it. I was having the best time, just me and my skate, and so was in no hurry to leave the bus stop.
A few minutes later a taxi drove by. As it passed, the driver slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. The driver started honking and waving at me. I rolled up to the cab and to my surprise, it was my friend Dave. Spotting me in the city so late at night, Dave was surprised too. Most taxi drivers I’d seen were older and grungy. Dave was closer to my age, but still fit the part somehow. I got in and on the ride over the bridge, he told me he’d been nearly done with his shift and was almost back to the taxi depot, when he got the call for an airport run. Normally, he wouldn’t have taken the call. But a little voice, not unlike the one I heard earlier, told him to take it. He didn’t think much about the voice he heard until I shared my experience with the voice I heard, and how it led me to stay at the bus stop. We both agreed that there was cosmic influence conspiring to align our meeting.
Dave dropped me at my front door. I went to sleep that night grateful for the turn of events. At the time, did I have any idea what had truly transpired that night? Not really, I had little understanding of the intangible factors that guided our paths to intersect.
A few years later I joined a community of Zen Buddhist monks. The majestic temple Tassajara has been a Zen retreat since 1957 when the Zen Master Suzuki Roshi traveled from Japan to bring Soto-Zen Buddhism to the west. Tassajara is nestled in the bottom of a beautiful valley in the Los Padres mountains of central California. Natural sulfur hot springs erupt from the mountainside into the Tassajara creek which runs right through the valley. Along the creek there are traditional Japanese cabins and meditation halls. Meditating with the elder monks and reading about Zen teachers who mastered their own universe encouraged me to seek a deeper understanding of my own reality. I sat face-to-face with Zen masters, I asked them about their experiences with temporal shifts and timeless connections. Many had similar experiences to mine.
In a private meeting with my Zen teacher Myo Lahey, he explained that the voice I heard was mine – it was my higher self. A version of myself that exists without ego, one connected to my past, present, and future selves. Myo went on to explain that one’s higher self knows only what is best for your evolution. It will act on that accordingly and if you listen to what it says, and also act accordingly, you will always be right where you are supposed to be. I was intrigued by this knowledge. I delved deeply into subjects of lucid dreaming, astral projection, timelessness, and multi-dimensional realities.
In the early mornings, the monks rang a bell to wake us and call us to the meditation hall. One morning I could hear the ringing of the bell drift through my dreams. The monks had stopped ringing the bell, but its ring still echoed. The ringing lingered through my mind as if it were lost in a great timeless expanse of consciousness. I asked myself, “Am I awake? Where am I?” In fact, I was not awake in the traditional sense, I was lucid dreaming, meaning I became aware that I was dreaming. I was awake within my dream. I was aware that the ringing bell was not in my dream, but I was in my dream, I then realized that I was now in control of my dream. I’d read about lucid dreaming in Carlos Castaneda’s writing, and because of this I knew what was happening. The lucid dream state was euphoric and timeless, I could hear the same voice that I heard at the bus stop years earlier. It spoke to me, but this time it was different, like receiving a direct transmission of highly transcendent knowledge. I released myself from the lucid dream and awoke with a deeper, greater understanding that time is only a construct, it has no function outside of our three-dimensional experience.
My buddy Dave the cab driver had described a similar voice speaking through him that told him to take the call intersecting our paths. He would have had to receive that call much earlier than when the bus drove right past me. The time between Dave taking the airport call and the bus passing me is irrelevant to our higher selves. The decision I made that night in San Francisco was simple. It was to show up in authenticity, in the moment, instead of choosing lower vibrations like anger or frustration. This choice resulted in a universal rearrangement, which was all perfectly designed for my absolute highest good. A more skeptical mind might assume it was pure coincidence. I am here to assure you that there really is no such thing as coincidence. If you want to know it for yourself, I suggest you practice meditation in any form, and explore the many great teachings of the ones that came before us to lay the foundation of mindfulness practice, there you will find the answers you seek.
“Everyone should meditate for at least twenty minutes a day, but if you do not have time for that, then you should meditate for an hour.” ~Zen proverb
