Psalm Maker: The Journal of Booker Jones

Chapter One

The speaker is a human being not too dissimilar from you if you are reading these words. The speaker is not separate from you or above you in any understanding that you cannot also experience. The experience that we all desire in our every moment of life is peace—the inside peace that emanates outwardly in our behavior as love.

The speaker has lived the chaotic life of seeking pleasure and satisfaction in the America of material objectification, and there was no peace at the end of success. Although the body survived, the mind generated constant fears and comparisons, and the center of true awareness was layered in darkness.

One early foggy morning in May 1995, the speaker walked out of his ego-made affluence and offered himself naked into the night in a desperate gesture to remake himself as a human being. The path from that moment to this is a purposeful process, a continuing process that my brothers and sisters in the traditional community of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico have helped the speaker to realize.

Cathia, the speaker’s companion, has urged this unfinished man to write his observations as they may serve as a comfort, and be of interest, as a meditation on our common journey. The speaker undertakes the task at the risk of humility, that virtue so embraced by the Pueblo Indian, and so important to all harmony and happiness.

In writing, the speaker holds no claim on reason or art. What is herein expressed is a gift passed through one consciousness to another part of itself. For the speaker, it is merely breath sent forth as the vortex of the living water that Creation provides as the basis of relationship.

Chapter Two

You must leave the world to see the beauty of a mountain stream. You must, for those moments, leave behind the authoritarian implications of responsibility. The quiet night does not argue loudly and become red in the face with excessive gestures. The smell of the piñon pines and the fragrance of the eucalyptus are your incenses of devotion. As the exploding world recedes from the mind, in the silence flowing within the stream water, a person may become serious and dedicated. Time is not a factor when there is no meditator in meditation. This is the art of being—to sit naked in the night, offering self in the tenderness of the morning as it emerges into full light.

Following the going to water, and the submission to light, a person moves back into the world with revived awareness. The countryside, the houses, the farmers in the field, the passing car, and the blue sky through the leaves are nameless in their existence as a sea stretched before you in an infinity of awe. You walk in freedom. The fullness of it allows you to weep with joy.

Chapter Three

Perhaps there are stages in a life lived to elderness. Once there was a boy who dreamed of heroic deeds and followed his eclectic curiosity along marsh banks in search of turtles, and muskrats, and green snakes that could be hung like necklaces around his neck to surprise and horrify his mother who always gave the wise instruction, Now put that snake back where you found it!

Summers of gathering enough kids for a baseball game or going to Norfolk’s Ocean View on the Chesapeake Bay to swim and catch crabs or spot fish from a rowboat, turning brown on exposed skin and blonde on the tips of a short hair crew cut—these flashes of remembrance seem to idolize the child in an age of playful growing up although at school he was taught to duck and cover in anticipation of an atomic bomb attack.

There are, of course, the memories of first romantic encounters with girls—of the challenge to attain enough courage to hold her hand or to ask her to a movie; then the unfolding of sexual urges and passions, so exciting, so confusing in their church-taught moral dilemmas; and the stress of high school—grades and social acceptance, the expectations of parents, the awareness of class differences, the academic achievers separated from the non-achievers, success by association, dressing to fit a group’s standard, learning to dance, and striving to be liked (even admired), the realization of competition, of the adversarial nature of winning a scholarship or a date with a cheerleader.

When did it happen? When did the child cross over the bridge of no return into the land of discontent and conflict? When did the living become so driven by events—first sexual encounter, fraternity initiation, walking the Lawn at the University of Virginia to accept a degree, first job, first new car, first wife, first house, first child, first million dollars? And then what?

It is a very old idea that a human being can profit by gaining the whole material world and still lose the soul. But what is the soul? How do you satisfy the soul? Is the soul appeased by good character, or must one become a monk and forsake all desire? These are seldom the questions of youth. Must the body and mind survive to an age for such questions to surface? Is the middle-age crisis some divine genetic program? Did cave dwellers of the ancient past come to their middle age and question their philosophies and the purpose of their lives? Is this an ancient condition, or a circumstantial modern one?

If contemplation on such internal issues becomes an obsession, does it lead to madness? If there are no answers to the questions of who and what we are, will we become self-destructive?

It may be said that the man who walked away from his home on the Lafayette River in Norfolk—walked away totally naked without concern for the consequences—was insane. At the very least, he might have been judged incompetent and irresponsible. If he were seen as desperate, less fortunate citizens would have decried his arrogance. What had he to complain about? What was he protesting? He was affluent, successful, secure. What in the world did the man want? He seemingly had everything.

This was the condition of Winston Burlington Conover when he reached the age of 54 in 1995. He was the living organism who would take the name Booker Washington Jones, and who, living among a small tribe of traditional Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, would transition into Anglo Who Became Chief Old Woman’s Son. In his own consciousness, the three names represented three states of awareness within the same body. All the memories were retained, and they were like videotapes that could be replayed when required. The fact that memory can be left dormant until consciously summoned into awareness was a great and important lesson for the man to learn and experience. Without the conditioned past of the mind, the being was able to focus completely on the present, to experience everything as fresh, new, and amazing. In relationship, the non-judgmental state presented no barriers. It was a quality that others could perceive. It opened the door to friendship, trust, and affection. It allowed for happiness in every circumstance.

Chapter Four

Frustration turns to anger, and the chemistry of it requires release that often is expressed as violence. But how is a society to prevent frustration, especially a society that advertises a material quality of life that most of its citizens cannot achieve? Demagogues claim that everything desired is possible in free enterprise, but in a competitive community, a person cannot construct a ladder to economic success without tools. The so-called underclass cannot have realistic aspirations without social and educational tools. For them, there is no possibility to build a ladder to what should be, but never is.

A man walks in the deep silence of night before the sun touches the hills, and the birds announce the day with their chirping excitement. There are no clouds in the sky, and everything in the valley is rejoicing, except the human beings. They are too occupied with their problems, their agonies, their violence. They strive for passing pleasures, but everything seems to depend on labor and sorrow. The potential, the wonder, of the day is compromised before it begins.

The man does not believe the myth of suffering. For him, there is the mysterious intensity of the moment. He wonders why people want to construct ladders when they can fly.

Once the man accepted his class and his status as something earned or ordained. All the media agreed—the day of the upper middle class was a good day. All the instruments of the society proclaimed his values, his wealth, his power. He had achieved everything that was advertised as success, and yet, he felt as vulnerable as a homeless street person begging for coins and recognition. With all that he had accumulated as testaments to his worth, he was poor of spirit, destitute of satisfaction. How is such a conditioned person to remake himself? Was it even possible to find the quiet mind?

The man turned inward and watched the functions of thought as they emerged. Gradually, he discovered that a watched thought cannot endure. It fades under observation. The process led to fewer and fewer thoughts that were observed, rather than challenged, and allowed to dissipate. After some months of internal focus, the man began to realize that there was something beyond his thoughts, a reality prior to thought. In the stillness of the mind, the essence of being emerged—wordless, thoughtless, but powerfully evident. When realized, the center of this thoughtless awareness radiated throughout the body and gave a sensual feeling of warmth, contentment, even bliss. The man wanted to remain in this state, but submission rather than desire was the only way to maintain it. In the mindful state, the man wonders if a person could function in the world acting from the quiet mind rather than the conditioned, chaotic mind. It was the search for the answer to this question that prompted the man to offer himself naked into the night. The fact that he crossed the country from Virginia to New Mexico and took residence among a small tribe of Pueblo Indians is as unimaginable today as it was as it occurred.

Cathia, the man’s companion, assures him that some divine purpose has been served by his radical change in life. He does not speculate on such things but is grateful to be used as opportunity presents itself. The memory of Las Vegas and what occurred there and in Red Rock Canyon and the Valley of Fire are accessible but not relevant to today except in the smiles of White Wing, Carlos, Sue and Debbie, and our brother-father Joseph. They speak of great events, but the man knows that all encounters are important, and that living can be done only in the next relationship no matter how trivial the circumstance. Someone serves you or you serve them, and in that moment is everything of importance as you express gratitude in both the giving and the receiving. In this moment, there is no separation. This harmony is the goal and the gold of living. There are no greater riches. The test of humanity is in remembering that the ego is not the Self. Self is prior to thought. It is from the Self that we generate righteous behavior. But the Self cannot be articulated. It can only be experienced.

Chapter Five

He had been for an hour’s walk and was coming back when he saw the snake. It was a long, fat snake with a diamond pattern in its scales and a white rattle at the end of its tail. It crossed the hot dusty road in front of him, seeking the cooler shaded sanctuary of the rocky hillside. The man followed it and stood quite close by as it peered into every hole and crevice of the rock face. It seemed totally unaware of him. The man stooped down and got the snake’s attention by singing softly to it. It turned toward him, but it did not react as if it perceived danger. For some minutes the man sang to the snake, and the snake seemed to listen patiently, tasting the sense of the man on its flickering tongue. The man was telling the snake how beautiful it was and how much he appreciated sharing the snake’s world. There was an aura of contentment between them—nothing desired, nothing threatened. After some minutes, the encounter ended, and they parted at the side of the road, man and snake en route to their individual destinations. The only witnesses were a curious yellow butterfly and a small lizard who had observed the large bulge at the middle of the snake’s length and so held its fearless posture on a sunlit boulder.

There are prejudices toward snakes in the cultural memory that would define unguarded encounters on a country road. The conditioned man might have allowed fear to intrude on the moment and even escalate insecurity to violence against the stereotyped body of the animal. But in the absence of thought, relationship was made possible. Without the conviction of threat, proximity was comfortable, even welcomed. Just as the word is not the thing itself, thought is not the truth about reality. A man communes with a snake in the thoughtless awareness of its nature and discovers a beauty that no word or thought can convey. Reality occurs in the spaces between words and thoughts. In the spaces between is relationship—between a man and a snake, between lovers, between parents and children, between strangers. This is the place from which to live, from which to generate all behavior.

The man would admit that oftentimes decisions generated from the mind yielded failure and disappointment. But action from the quiet mind was always appropriate to situation and circumstance. And thus when asked what the man would do in any given drama of existence, he could say no more than that he did not know. He did not know because he was no longer dependent on memory or the conditioned reflex of behavior. He did not know because he could not predict what awareness then might do. A long, fat venomous snake will cross the road close to you next week. Have you already decided to run away or to seek some weapon to destroy it? Have you predetermined your behavior in thousands of imagined situations? Will you then be aware, be alive to events when they occur, or will you repeat some learned pattern of your society upbringing and be dead to all other possibilities and potentials?

Chapter Six

In the culture of his childhood, the formality of an English bred father, there was little expressed affection. Men shook hands. They did not touch women in familiar ways. They did not make public displays with kisses and hugs. A man like his father would pat another man on the shoulder in a rare extension of emotion that might occur at a funeral. A father is the model for the boy.

The man had not touched his own son and daughter enough in their growing up to make them comforted by his putting his arms around them as adults. Perhaps they saw his reaching out now as the act of a stranger in their father’s skin. They more identified their father with reserve than with compassion. It was not love lost so much as it was love constrained by dependence on the dryness of manners more suited to the esquire of a manor house. In retrospect, the man could almost laugh at the stiff deportment of his previous self. It was supercilious, but it was also sad. A gentle touch is never wasted. It stretches goodwill into healing vibrations. It is the right use of human energy. To hold back the expression of affection saves nothing but regret.

In the face of a woman is all her children yet unborn. In the face of a man are his forefathers—all dead. In their meeting, the future and the past are joined for the continuation of human seasons. It is so in every comforting touch, when hands are joined, when an adult reaches out to a child. Every gentle