may not explicitly declare as much, the condition of being “saved”—that is, of having no need to fret over the plight of human existence. While there is nothing inherently contemptible about the saved, I nonetheless could not help but scorn them. One might say that this was the result of my envy of persons who did not suffer from the defects, or at least the same defects, that I did. To my mind, though, I despised the saved for what I saw as their sense of contentment with the order of being in its physical essence, its psychological essence, and not unusually in a metaphysical essence they contended to experience, so boundless they could be in their outright assertions of directly apprehending all reality.
The whole business of a therapist’s or guru’s occupation was in my view tantamount to a swindle. There is no necessary or sufficient reason to possess, or feign to possess, a sense of salvation in light of the pain of existence. But because I was taking a chance that Dr. O might do me some good, I had to go along with his being saved, even if it was all an act to cover up the unavoidable harm that awaits us all. As a physician of mine once said in a rare moment of candor, “Everybody ends up badly. At best, it’s only the luck of one in a million if you don’t see it coming. I should know. It’s my business.” Afterward, he charged me a considerable sum for an emergency surgery. Such episodes have been a running theme in my life since my earliest days. You could attribute my psychological instability to this fact as well as to the dream occasions that so suspiciously bled into my quotidian life that sometimes I could not tell one from the other, which hypothetically might be attributed to there being no actual distinction between them.
On top of all of the above-mentioned ordeals concerning my presence in the world, my therapist-guru took liberties that I resented. One of these liberties that aggrieved me also intimated and suggested to me Dr. O’s true identity as nothing but a swindler was the following: he was always moving around the city to take advantage of rental rates and lowered property taxes attaching to places that had become undesirable due to criminal activities and other forms of urban degeneration. Dr. O once explained this strategy to me when I complained about coming to see him in a warehouse hovel by the city’s docks, a venue that attracted an array of unlawful enterprises.
“An indifference to one’s surroundings,” Dr. O intoned, “is basic to any psychological or spiritual advancement. The Enlightened One himself relocated from a palace to a life of uncertainty and hardship on the open road, not the other way around.”
What authenticity was contained in Dr. O’s excuse for his deteriorating professional locales, I could not tell. How else could he explain his questionable migrations—that he was perpetually on the run from creditors as a consequence of some illegal undertaking on his part? Even if I suggested such a possibility, he would only have recast this accusation to conform to his public image as an elevated being who was well worth the discount rates he charged. Naturally, an excuse of this kind would just exacerbate my scorn for the saved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe, while at the same time highlighting my impotence to challenge their claim. This inability of mine to impugn their felicitous vision of themselves and everything else only bolstered his point. Whatever he was, Dr. O was a creature who could flourish in the worst conditions—if only until his day finally came—and this gift went a long way toward confirming his authority to direct the lives of defective persons such as myself.
For me, the consequence of being out of work, which was both a cause for and result of my turning to the services of Dr. O, led me to overlook that his base of operations was situated in what was known as the “battleground
The whole business of a therapist’s or guru’s occupation was in my view tantamount to a swindle. There is no necessary or sufficient reason to possess, or feign to possess, a sense of salvation in light of the pain of existence. But because I was taking a chance that Dr. O might do me some good, I had to go along with his being saved, even if it was all an act to cover up the unavoidable harm that awaits us all. As a physician of mine once said in a rare moment of candor, “Everybody ends up badly. At best, it’s only the luck of one in a million if you don’t see it coming. I should know. It’s my business.” Afterward, he charged me a considerable sum for an emergency surgery. Such episodes have been a running theme in my life since my earliest days. You could attribute my psychological instability to this fact as well as to the dream occasions that so suspiciously bled into my quotidian life that sometimes I could not tell one from the other, which hypothetically might be attributed to there being no actual distinction between them.
On top of all of the above-mentioned ordeals concerning my presence in the world, my therapist-guru took liberties that I resented. One of these liberties that aggrieved me also intimated and suggested to me Dr. O’s true identity as nothing but a swindler was the following: he was always moving around the city to take advantage of rental rates and lowered property taxes attaching to places that had become undesirable due to criminal activities and other forms of urban degeneration. Dr. O once explained this strategy to me when I complained about coming to see him in a warehouse hovel by the city’s docks, a venue that attracted an array of unlawful enterprises.
“An indifference to one’s surroundings,” Dr. O intoned, “is basic to any psychological or spiritual advancement. The Enlightened One himself relocated from a palace to a life of uncertainty and hardship on the open road, not the other way around.”
What authenticity was contained in Dr. O’s excuse for his deteriorating professional locales, I could not tell. How else could he explain his questionable migrations—that he was perpetually on the run from creditors as a consequence of some illegal undertaking on his part? Even if I suggested such a possibility, he would only have recast this accusation to conform to his public image as an elevated being who was well worth the discount rates he charged. Naturally, an excuse of this kind would just exacerbate my scorn for the saved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe, while at the same time highlighting my impotence to challenge their claim. This inability of mine to impugn their felicitous vision of themselves and everything else only bolstered his point. Whatever he was, Dr. O was a creature who could flourish in the worst conditions—if only until his day finally came—and this gift went a long way toward confirming his authority to direct the lives of defective persons such as myself.
For me, the consequence of being out of work, which was both a cause for and result of my turning to the services of Dr. O, led me to overlook that his base of operations was situated in what was known as the “battleground
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