I have come to accept the inverse celebrityhood that accompanies my writing. With each book, I gain palpable substance as a human being, along with the mysterious cost of connecting with ever fewer readers.
A hotshot author once explained to me at a writing conference you can’t sell non-fiction without a “platform,” i.e., an audience of followers. Well, that sucks. As a marketeer, I’ve been building platforms my whole life — for gurus, spiritual teachers, CEOs, start-ups, and politicians, but now I live with that sinking realization — whoops, I forgot to build one for me.
My brief fling with celebrity came last year when I was interviewed for an hour-long podcast. To my surprise, the two hosts neglected to ask a question about my book.
Yes, it’s sour grapes, but also fermented grapes. Part of me yearns for a stage, but I’m also smart enough to recognize the soul-crushing cost. The moment you believe your own myth as a person, your growing creative edge becomes stunted.
There is no upside to fame… Fame is a little bit like chemotherapy. It can wipe out everything, but if you get past it, it can cure you. ~ T-Bone Burnett speaking about Elton John.
Last month, Bhagwan challenged me: “You're presuming you're Bruce Miller, but are you, Bruce Miller? That's the question.” He went further, “Becoming a teacher is the ultimate trap.” Yikes.
That didn’t stop my mother. She basked in the limelight as a PR guru with multiple entries in the Guinness Book of World Records. My dad, in contrast, had bankable bonafides as the father of high fidelity, yet he never gave a twit.
As a group of teens, I remember driving to McDonald’s on summer nights with The Doors, Zeppelin, and Hendrix blaring out our car windows. None of my friends knew my dad invented the technology that sent stereo over the airwaves to the FM radio in the car — I didn’t know either. The truth is, my dad was happier digging dirt and planting flowers.
Last week, I finally got to shine in the limelight surrounded by eager followers. I was sitting at a table, explaining how to reinvent your life. I remember their pensive expressions, following every word with doe-eyed wonder. I described how to get a second Uplift in life before the motor of self begins to sputter. As I stood to stretch my legs, a stranger suddenly approached, put a scruffy envelope in my hand, flipped it over, and scribbled, “6:30 pm Flagstaff House.”
I glanced up and realized it was a woman. More than being struck by her looks, style, personality, or vibe, I made contact with her being — soul to soul. Whoa, this is different, I thought. Somewhere “upstairs,” we were one, the real Bondo.
Then, the clues filtered in. Flagstaff House? That was a fancy mountain-top restaurant in Boulder where I took Penny, my first girlfriend, in 1979. bzzt bzzt wakeup bruce. Oh, this a dream! How did I know? That’s what dreams do — they conflate time and place. Even more, it was a veridical dream:
Veridical dream: A dream with previously unknown events to the dreamer that are the same as objective reality. A veridical dream may be predictive of events yet to come, but it may also accurately represent events occurring while the dreamer is in a dream state or that occurred previously.1
I can count my veridical dreams on one hand, so I took the message as a guidepost. After 12 months of wandering in the Bondo desert, I had given up on longing. To my surprise, the dream reawakened the sense that knowing, rather than desire or attraction, accompanies conscious love. Reshad explained, “The love we talk about so glibly must become conscious love.”
This is a book about Bondo, so let’s take it further: Bondo proceeds from one word: to be recognized. In the dream, I was recognized. Conscious love is to be recognized.
From Latin, recognitio means to know again — roughly translated: you used to know, fell into a dream, were awakened, and know again.
When you are recognized, your heart is liberated to awaken your conscious self. Like with Bondo, recognition is soul-to-soul. Imagine a green shoot awakening from the Sun’s warmth, the mysterious energy of pure consciousness. In a single glance, you become connected in love.
When I interviewed Karen for my first book, Fortune, she shared what it means to be recognized. Karen explained how at age 28, at her Saturn’s Return, she quit her job as a nurse in Santa Cruz, headed to Big Sur, lived out of her car for two weeks, and enjoyed the Esalen baths every midnight, until one day, seeking to step into the next chapter of her life, she climbed up a steep waterfall at the beach on a self-styled vision quest. She was tangled in brambles at the top and felt called to surrender. She laid down in the stream, went over the rocks and rapids — and got hurt.
Instinctively, Karen drove to Deetjen’s Inn, knocked on the kitchen door, and spent a bruised night nurtured by the attentive staff. The following day, she returned to Santa Cruz to recuperate. As part of her healing, she worked with a rebirther who suggested she meet Reshad Feild.
Karen’s recounted the story in Fortune:
"I started my search to find Reshad at the Rajneesh Center. I asked, 'Do you know Reshad Feild and where he lives?' And they said, 'Oh yes, he lives right down the street.' I met a woman pruning roses at the address. She invited me to come to a talk that very night.
"As it turned out, Reshad was ill and did not attend. Afterward, I mentioned that I was a nurse and if I could be of service, please call me.
"So, they called and invited me to lunch the next day. They created this incredibly beautiful meal with maybe a dozen people around the table, and I was the guest of honor. I had never received this kind of attention before.
"We finished the meal with Turkish coffee. Reshad instructed, ‘Turn your cup over.’ He gestured for my inverted cup, and I passed it to him. As he turned it around, observing the grounds inside, I sensed he was reading me — not the grounds. He saw the shape of a crescent moon. ‘You will travel very far in the Work,’ Reshad announced. I didn’t know what to say, but I felt at home.
"I returned that evening. After Reshad’s talk, I again became the center of attention. He took my hands and noticed ‘how kind I was’ by looking at my forearms. Soon, I was in floods of tears. Someone took me upstairs and prepared a bath for me with fragrant lotions. When I came back downstairs, I felt completely recognized for the first time in my life.
Reshad described recognition as a soul-to-soul reflection — the true Bondo:
Suddenly, almost unexpectedly, the light of the soul is seen to shine through another. Yet, there is just the faintest intuition that it is not so much that person’s light, but rather a Light that was always there, wishing to be recognized and seen in the world.
At times like this, a person may become completely transfigured and joy can spring forth. The light that breaks out into the open will enable that person to see the same light in others. This can be the beginning of true communication, the chance of a mystical embrace, and perhaps the early beginnings of the mystical dialogue that takes place between God and man.2
Karen continued her story:
"I have never shared my story about the waterfall before. I didn’t think people would understand it or would grasp the mystery behind the events that change our lives. Going over the waterfall represented my willingness to sacrifice everything to live in the spiritual dimension of life. It led me to a school where people had dedicated their lives to living in this spiritual dimension, which is not the illusion but the reality of life.”
Let me continue my side of the story: Some months later, having broken up with my girlfriend and living in L.A., I wrote a letter to Reshad about visiting him in Santa Cruz. In my flippant way, I added a postscript: “Reshad, why don’t you set me up on a blind date.”
Karen jumped back in: “That’s your thing,” Karen retorted. “You think you were so flippant. But you weren’t so flippant. You were serious, too! But you won’t admit it to yourself.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember walking in the door and Reshad gesturing toward each woman in the room, saying, ‘I was thinking about this one, and this one, and this one.’ Then he pointed at you, announcing, ‘But this is the one.’ It seemed incredibly awkward.”
“It was embarrassing,” Karen remembered, “but I had come to expect that from him.”
“I remember this whoosh of energy — and I’m supposed to be the cerebral guy. There was this whoosh of love energy. And I thought, ‘Whoa! This is really happening.’ And by ‘whoa,’ I mean there was a sense of shock, like an octave shock.”
“You found it shocking?”
“Not in that way,” I explained. “But unlike the people who make their ideal partner lists — and I hate those lists — my list would have been all wrong. I would have ordered all the wrong things. You’re so different from anyone I could have conceived.”
“So, maybe you felt shocked, but…”
“There was this whoosh of energy,” I continued. “You were completely present and connected in my being. And that was profound. At the same time, there was this shock, this holy-shit wake-up call. My preconceived notions of my partner were turned upside down.”
My veridical dream triggered my forty-year memory of finding Karen in my heart. I thumped my chest during our interview: “Hello. You in there?”
In the current dream, I met my veridical love mate outside of space and time, beyond body and personality. Could this be Karen playing tricks — communicating through my dreams? Karen sending an SOS? “Bruce, honey, don’t give up.”
Yesterday, on the Facebook group “Awakened Souls Dating and Relationships,” I connected with Dustin, a mountain man from Nederland, Colorado,” who shared his experience with veridical dreams:
Attract what you want and manifest it. That’s how I attracted my divine Goddess. One must be divine to attract the divine. Otherwise, you won't vibrate. I was talking to her in meditation and dreams months before meeting. I was told she wasn't ready at first. As our meeting got closer, my dreams became more like reality — until they became reality. I realized we have been together outside of this existence. It is magical, and it will happen. Just keep doing the work. Don't beg or chase. Ask Source to guide you towards her.
Is this poppycock? Hey, it’s Christmas morning as I write this, so why not?
The poppycock continued when my friend Sarah gave me a book for my birthday, How to Marry Your Soul Mate In a Year — Or Less. The author, Dr. Aggie Jordan, is no mere mountain man. She has some kind of doctorate and counsels her readers to reach into the quantum world:
Vision your mate by sending these desires out to them. Your future mate will be ready to receive the signals when you are ready to send them. Your mate will pick up the signal. You need only to be clear about the message.
If that wasn’t confusing enough, I listened to a podcast with acclaimed author/speaker Alain De Botton, who shredded the poppycock in an interview:
The current world is confused about love… For about the last 250 years we've been loving under the aegis of a philosophy we could call Romanticism. And Romanticism is a vision of love with very particular assumptions. Let me run through a few of them.
• There's one soul mate for everybody and you're going to find this soul mate.
• You'll find them through slightly mysterious ways, almost quasi-divine like you'll feel pulled.
• You'll meet them at the supermarket, checkout line, the nightclub, and without even knowing too much about them, you will sense that they're your destiny.
• A force will pull you, and you will feel this is the one, and they will be an Angel – a descended being from another world.
…We tend to believe nowadays that love is an emotion that we should feel, never a skill that we should learn.3
Well, that’s sobering. Bondo is more than a feeling. It’s an act of volition, a value we bring to life, and a skill to learn.
It’s been 12 months since my golden umbilical of unlimited Bondo was severed. With Karen’s passing, a love chasm ripped open beneath my feet. I found myself space-walking without a golden life-support tether. At best, I felt I could survive 12 months before the well ran dry — and I needed to learn fast.
If you’ve been reading along, it’s been exactly 12 months, and this is graduation week.
Like a fireworks crescendo, I packed the schedule for the final week: Thursday, Bruce’s Birthday Bash; Friday, First Official Bondo Workshop, and Saturday, Darshan with Karen — an insane plan for a singleton to pull off. My son was visiting, so we added daily yoga to up the amperage. Plus, a week later, we planned to host the celebration of Rumi in my living room. Yes, a crescendo.
On Monday night of Karen week, I got a text: “Jazz tonite?” My son and I were exhausted from yoga but I was still obligated to my New Year’s vow, so off we went to Joe Gransden’s Jazz Jam. We arrived at 9 pm, just as the kitchen closed. We found a pizza joint next door and snuck two boxes of greasy pizza into the venue just as a soul musician took the stage. With his slip-slidin’ trombone and pure Satchmo gravel, he moved heaven and earth:
I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there;
She was stretched out on a long, white table,
So cold, so sweet, so fair.Let her go, let her go, God bless her,
Wherever she may be,
She can search this wide world over,
But she'll never find a sweet man like me.
His sloppy slurs, muted wah-wah, and slow Satchmo cadence triggered my labile memory of seeing Karen stretched out and zipped into a bag. My year wasn’t over.
On the drive home, I streamed the 1959 Audio Fidelity recording of Louis Armstrong, one of the first-ever stereo recordings. The LP formed the soundtrack to my childhood as my dad demonstrated stereo in our living room along with bowling balls, steam trains, and ping pong recordings. The slow sliding trombone creates a morbid dissonance you can feel. Over and over, and all week, I couldn’t stop playing St. James.
Three days later, I pulled the birthday guests from the kitchen to form a circle in the living room. I clicked on St. James and invited people to turn like dervishes in honor of Karen.
I was desperate for a 12-month finale, some weighty act to create a sense of completion for the energy to go through. In the Reshad school, we became adept at allowing the energy to go through. This question, “Did the energy go through?” carried mystical significance, and we always asked it. We were practicing to become tubes.
The movement of energy became our singular concern. Reshad taught us to feel blocked energy from asphalt paving and violence to the land. We learned earth acupuncture and how to drive iron rods wrapped in copper to guide the earth’s energy into areas of depletion and violence. We also learned how a Whirling Dervish channels spirals of energy, two simultaneous vortexes — one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, like a DNA helix in motion.
The energy going through is central to the Law of the Octave, what Gurdjieff called the Law of Seven. The Law of Seven governs the transformation of energy. Reshad was an Octave magician who knew how to transmit this zigzag flow of rising energy through the inner action of our work. We learned how to feel the energy in our bones when it went through the Si-Do interval. The expression of gratefulness at the Si-Do interval released the old and allowed the new to come through.
This sense of completion described my year-long quest for a life reset.
My birthday party was like most parties — people eating and jabbering without much structure except the St. James moment and when I pulled out my saxophone to riff on the Stones’ song, Miss You:
I've been holdin' out so long
I've been sleepin' all alone
Lord, I miss you
Yes, missing you know who.
With my new role as Mr. Bondo, I felt an obligation, so I ambled over to Jean, a 95-year-old famous psychotherapist who sat deep into a sofa apart from the partying crowd. I noticed her walker but sensed her desire to get onto the dance floor.
I sat beside Jean on the couch and invoked the Bondo protocol: Situate eye-to-eye, lean heart-first, and lavish attention.
“Jean, thank you so much for coming,” I smiled. “Sorry, we can’t dance.”
“Oh yes, I used to love to dance. Henry and I, we’d tear up the dance floor.”
“Well, I would love to dance with you!” I joked.
We both laughed. Then I noticed that despite the walker, hearing aids, and separation from the festivities, Jean was fully alive. And shockingly, more alive than the full-mobility folks in the kitchen. Even more, I felt recognized — my first such moment with the opposite sex since Karen passed.
“Weird to feel like a youngster on my 73rd birthday,” I gushed, catching some Bondo from a woman just under 100.
Jean retorted with a sharp-as-tack twinkle: “That’s age-ism!”
Jean exuded much-desired warmth as we hung out, shouting over the party din. I shared my post-Karen experiment of “actively engaging grief.” Jean was impressed.
“For two years after my husband died,” Jean confessed, “I couldn’t even breathe.”
We smiled in the light of recognition. I can’t understate the importance of outside confirmation when you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall. Despite this sense, my interlude with Jean was unsettling. Karen’s passing presented aging and death as an uninvited preview of coming attractions. Maybe my endless yoga and creative ambition are an attempt to cheat death. But, since it’s my birthday, let me pretend.
The guests eventually left, and I fed the dog (11 pm). Back in the day, after the last plate was washed, counter wiped, and candles blown out, Karen and I would linger to bask in the free-floating love — sometimes listening to Van Morrison’s Common One or Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. Legs up, we’d measure the return on investment from our mountain of effort, knowing full well there’s no metric for afterglow. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, re-watch the final scene of Babette’s Feast.
Babette, a hard-working French cook in a Danish convent, reflects on what to do with the 10,000 francs she won in the lottery. Feeling inspired, she asks the convent sisters to let her prepare a gourmet French meal for their pastor's celebration. Babette orders wines, live quail, turtle, and more from Paris despite the skepticism of the sisters, who are content with meager fare.
Amid the warmth and wonder of the feast, old quarrels are healed, and past sins are forgiven. As the dinner ends, the stoic parishioners spontaneously join hands to dance. Too tired to stand, Babette sits alone, staring into an emptiness beyond space and time — the afterglow.
The sisters declare, “That was a very good dinner. We shall all remember this evening when you are back in Paris."
To everyone's surprise, Babette reveals she had been the head chef at Cafe Anglais in Paris and then announces, "I'm not going back to Paris. There is no one waiting for me. They are all dead. And I have no money."
Shocked, one of the sisters asks, "What about the 10,000 francs?"
“All spent,” Babette replies.
“But dear Babette, you should not have given everything you owned for us.”
With quiet certainty, Babette answers, “An artist is never poor.”
Let that sink in: An artist is never poor.
I’ll never forget the night Karen and I and our housemates Wahhab and Kathleen saw Babett’s Feast at the circa 1929 Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. After the movie, we piled into my 1971 Datsun 510 and headed down Wilshire Boulevard, past the swanky restaurants with rows of Mercedes and Jaguars parked conspicuously in front.
“Let’s go there,” Wahhab announced with his characteristic swagger despite our four skimpy wallets. I must have been in a state of radical acceptance because the car swerved immediately toward the red-vested valets. Having just feasted on big-screen quail in a puff pastry shell with foie gras and truffle sauce (and starving), my little Datsun pulled under the canopy and let the valets open its doors.
“Good evening. Will you be dining with us tonight?”
Karen melted their hearts with a touch of Tennessee, “This is just lovely. Thank you.”
The maître d' peered over his glasses as we entered the lively hubbub, “Do you have reservations this evening?”
Karen sweet-talked in reply, “No, we just saw Babbett’s Feast and felt we must come here.”
“Well, very good, follow me.” With that, the monsieur led us to a puffy red, all-leather, semi-circular banquet with the sole commanding view of the center-stage fireplace. I assumed Orson Welles hadn’t shown, so him being late, they handed the jaw-dropping menus to the foursome in jeans.
I learned something from Babette. When basking in the afterglow, you carry a special presence from a world of pure love. This is the return on investment.
Forty years later, on my birthday night, and after single-handedly preparing Meera Sodha’s Chicken Curry (gingery, garlic-flecked tomato sauce with deep notes of cinnamon and cumin and a low flame of chile heat surrounding small chunks of skinless chicken thigh) and the complexly-flavored Cauliflower, Cashew, Pea and Coconut Curry, and my trademark Thai Butternut Squash Soup (subtly spiced with hand-smashed lemongrass stalks), I had no Karen to bask in the afterglow — just a 20-pound dog.
I went to my dark and cold front porch and summoned my imaginary partner in crime, Henny Youngman. Over his 60-year career, Henny had seen his share of empty tables and stained cloths after filling the house with joy and laughter.
“That was a big push, Henny,” I confided.
“Are you complaining?”
“I want to say no, but maybe I am.”
“Listen, kid…”
“I’m no kid…”
“You are to me. But let’s get real about life. My final movie appearance was a cameo as a mental patient claiming to be Henny Youngman. How do you think that made me feel?”
“My teacher said I’m claiming to be Bruce Miller.”
“See! You don’t need to feel so special.”
“You got a point.”
“And before that,” Henny continued, “I was a strip club owner in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ horror splatter film, The Gore Gore Girls.”
“Herschell Gordon Lewis!?” I exclaimed. “He was a low-rent filmmaker in my hometown — the father of one of my childhood buddies. My best friend Robbie’s girlfriend, Karen Burke, got sawed in half in The Wizard of Gore!”
“There ya go. Herschell proves it doesn’t matter what you do, just that you do it.”
“I guess.”
“You’ve got all these high expectations. The big moment in Gore Gore Girls is when this stripper Pickles is murdered, and her buttocks are mutilated with a meat tenderizer hammer before they are salt and peppered.”
“Salt and peppered? Geezus.”
“But there’s redemption,” Henny exclaimed. “My character helped capture this lunatic who had a grudge against G-strings. Crazy. We had to find the guy before he boiled another girl in a bowl of french fries!”
“Henny, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry; this is life. This is your life — giving love to everyone and sitting on a dark porch without a girl.”
“I’m going to cry. So, no return on investment?”
“Aw, come on,” Henry encouraged. “This is the food of life. Your highest work comes from the darkest places.”
“Henny, you don’t understand. For 12 months, I put every ounce of my being into riding this wave, twelve waves in an impossible year. And here I am, sitting in the cold with you, my dog, and the Gore Gore Girls.”
YOU GOT TWO MORE DAYS!” Henny roared. “You think this is curtains, that you’re some psychic who knows how the story comes out. Come on, celebrate! You’re still riding the wave and haven’t wiped out.”
Henny grasped his fiddle like a surf guitar and strutted down the walk with bad knees and a hunched back. I could hear him mimicking the fuzz-guitar solo from Wipe Out. “Nananananah nananananah…”
In my afterglow, my dog Miko snuggled a little closer to remind me of the words from James Baldwin:
“Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together by the love and the passion of a very few people.
https://www.llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/term/Veridical+Dream
From Feild, Reshad, Steps to Freedom, https://chalice.net/bookstore/
Diary of a CEO, Alain de Botton,