The Man Who Quit Money (23 page)

Yet even as these ideas began to cohere, he was not ready to put them into practice. “I’ve got to believe this stuff myself,” he wrote. “Obviously I don’t yet. I still keep losing faith and sliding back into this slavery of obligation.” He was not the first idealist to run into this problem. “But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money,” writes Lame Deer, “because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can’t get along without it.”

Suelo set about wresting himself from money. The first problem was his outstanding student loan. Years before, he had simply stopped making payments. But then a collection agency harassed his parents. They had cosigned for the loan, and if he reneged, his parents, now turning seventy, would be forced to pay. Paying this debt had been one of the first motivations for living without paying rent. This time, upon returning to Moab, he didn’t even bother with the ritual of renting a home before chafing and moving out. Instead, he immediately set up camp
in the canyon. Rehired at his old job at the shelter, he began chipping away at the principal, often paying double or triple the minimum monthly payment. He also returned to volunteering at Conrad Sorenson’s food emporium. “I come down here to the co-op to work for food, not money. It’s still reciprocation, but at least it’s a step, a weaning of myself from Babylon.”

By the following summer, he had paid off his student loan. He reported to Timo, “No bills, no rent, no insurance, no car, no license, no nonsense.” He was almost there. Yet something prevented him from taking the final step. He hoped to gain that last bit of resolve by sharing his wisdom with others.

Years earlier, in a letter to his sister, he had declared that writing was his true vocation. Now he finally felt stable enough to tackle it: “I’m still working on my mysteries of the universe treatise or whatever it is.” But as clear as the ideas were in his head, it was difficult to get them down on paper. “I want to find this message so clearly that a child can understand it—or a bullheaded adult, yet will at the same time be challenging to the most pragmatic scientist. It’s basic Ecology, pure and simple, I’m seeing at the heart of religion.”

But try as he might to express his message simply, every attempt came out garbled and confusing. So with the exception of Timo, Suelo didn’t tell anyone what he was up to. He recognized that it was extreme, weird, and half-baked. “I keep thinking that I’m going to start sharing these ideas with people, like here in Moab. But I realize how much I’m still a slave to hypocrisy. So I have to go hide in the desert some more, let my backbone develop, strengthen, so I can overcome my spinelessness.”

It occurred to him that the problem might be the medium, not the message. “Writing isn’t doing it for me,” he wrote to Tim
Frederick in 1998. “I need to share with people directly.” Suelo decided to present a lecture series at the local recreation center. He rented it for an hour for sixty dollars, and posted flyers all around town. “Common Spiritual Threads in World Religions” was the first installment. Admission cost one dollar.

Even in the run-up to the lecture, he encountered problems. He posted his advertisement on a bulletin board in the post office, but the next day it had been removed. He had pinned it beside a poster for a film festival, and that one was intact. He reposted, and the next day found that it was missing again. Finally he asked the clerk what had happened. She had taken it down because it was a commercial event, she informed him, whereas the film festival was nonprofit.

“But it only costs a dollar,” Suelo stammered. “And that won’t even cover the cost of the building.”

“Rules are rules.”

Suelo vowed never to charge money for his ideas again.

The night of the lecture arrived. Suelo arranged the rows of folding chairs. He reread his notes. A few familiar faces trickled in. Still a lot of empty seats. Then: his parents. They’d driven all the way from Fruita. In all, he attracted an audience of five. It was better than nothing. He lectured on Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. His parents asked a series of questions—pointed but not argumentative. It went off pretty well. Nonetheless: only five people. He couldn’t help but conclude the lecture was a flop. Plus the thing had cost him fifty-five dollars. He never got around to presenting the second lecture.

He grew impatient with ideas in general. “I still get frustrated that much of my philosophies are still just concepts in my
head. I need some kind of empowerment, energy. Getting excited about ideas isn’t enough. Writing them down isn’t enough.” Maybe his gift was not to articulate ideas, after all: it was to live them. “The sage makes bum-hood the ultimate art,” he wrote. It was clear that his spiritual path would require quitting money. But looking around him, he just didn’t see how that could happen. Save for street dregs and wilderness hermits, there was simply no tradition of living without money in the United States.

And so Suelo embarked on the next leg of his journey: he went to the East.

. . .

Sacred books only point out the way to God.
Once you have known the way, what is the use of books?

—Sri Ramakrishna

A
S SUELO WAS
spinning his wheels in Moab in 1998, he came across a book in the co-op library about a nineteenth-century Hindu mystic. Ramakrishna was an uneducated man who fell into semiconscious trances in which he appeared to make contact with God. Many considered him merely insane. Nonetheless, a band of devotees gathered around, convinced that he was an avatar—a divine being in human form. The prophet lived simply, in a temple funded by his followers, the same disciples who would later bring Hinduism to America, establishing the country’s first temple in San Francisco in 1906.

Suelo was deeply impressed. One day, according to the biography, a disciple decided to test the master’s aversion to money. He hid a rupee under the guru’s bed. Presently Ramakrishna returned to his bedroom. “No sooner had he touched the bed than he started back; he had felt the actual physical pain.”

Ramakrishna also articulated the futility Suelo suffered
working in charity. “How dare you talk of helping the world?” said Ramakrishna. “God alone can do that. First you must be made free from all sense of self; then the Divine Mother will give you a task to do.”

In January of 1999, Suelo left Moab, bound for India. Considering that he would eventually model his life after the Hindu sadhus, it’s tempting to assume that, inspired by his readings about Ramakrishna, he set out on an intentional pilgrimage to the master’s homeland. In fact, he might never have gone but for an invitation from Michael Friedman, who had spent a semester in India in college and wanted to return for medical research. “Randomness is my guru,” Suelo says, and once again he obeyed what it offered, considering the timing of the invitation auspicious. He traveled to Friedman’s home in Connecticut. There, the two men bought discounted plane tickets to Thailand, from where they could travel cheaply to India. They planned to spend a couple of months there.

On the eve of their departure, Friedman was delayed by illness. Daniel decided to fly to Bangkok on his own, with Friedman to follow in a month’s time. He arrived with a thousand dollars in his pocket, and not knowing a soul or a word of the language. He checked into a rat-infested hostel. “I had a month to kill. I was kind of freaked out.”

As with his introduction to Quito a decade earlier, Daniel’s first destination was the houses of worship. “The temples are quite beautiful, though I haven’t had a chance to see their innards yet,” he wrote. This trip marked the end of Daniel’s handwritten letters and the beginning of mass emails, which would evolve into the blog. He explained to the recipients, “You are part of an e-list that contains a hodgepodge of friends and family who are pagans,
agnostics & atheists, devout Christians, don’t-cares, universalists, Buddhists, Quakers, sprinkled with gay, straight, bi, and who knows what else. You each represent a facet of my mind and the contradictions I’ve sought to resolve within me.”

One day he happened upon a popular temple, and quietly sketched a statue of the Buddha in his journal. Although he had studied Eastern religions for years, he had never practiced them. But fresh from his reading of Ramakrishna, he was interested in meditation, and he wondered where a Westerner could learn it. He put the question to an attendant, who directed him to Wat Mahathat, a temple and monastery where practicing Buddhists prayed.

As Suelo plunged into the chaotic streets of Bangkok, he quickly became lost. He raced up and down the streets, no longer looking for the temple, just trying to find his way back to the hostel. As he walked along a tall stone wall, a hidden door swung open, and a monk in orange robes emerged. They almost collided. The monk clutched Suelo by the elbow, steered him through the door, and slammed it. Suelo found himself in a beautiful green garden.

“Where are you going?” said the monk, in good English.

“I’m looking for Wat Mahathat.”

“Well,” said the monk, smiling and waving his hand across the garden. “You’re here.”

Suelo was no longer surprised by these sorts of coincidences. Chance had delivered him once again. “My intention, if anything, was to go to India,” he says now, “and I wouldn’t have thought about that if Michael hadn’t asked me. My intention was to observe sadhus, maybe become a sadhu, and delve into Hinduism. But I got swept away by Buddhism.”

The monk introduced himself as Adjan Sumeto, and Suelo said he wished to learn to meditate.

“Follow me.” Sumeto led him to a bodhi tree—the same kind of tree beneath which the Buddha gained enlightenment—and briefly outlined the religion’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path. He said, “Now let’s meditate.”

The monk sat cross-legged, and Suelo joined him. He didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to do, and the monk didn’t explain, so Daniel just sat silently for twenty minutes. Then the monk plucked a leaf from the bodhi tree, wrote his name on it, ushered Suelo to the door, and told him to return at five the next morning. Daniel found his way back to the hostel. The next morning the monk led him to a room of Thai people in meditation and said, “There you go.” Suelo sat down and imitated the others. He sat through sermons in Thai. “No one seemed too concerned about me,” he says.

After a few days of this, another monk asked what he was doing there.

“I’m learning to meditate.”

“Who sent you here?”

“Adjan Sumeto.”

“Adjan Sumeto? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Adjan Sumeto.”

“Is he back in Thailand?”

Suelo related the story of their meeting, producing the signed bodhi leaf as evidence.

“You’re very lucky,” said the monk. “Many people wait many years to meet Adjan Sumeto. He is the most famous monk in all Thailand.”

Suelo never saw the mysterious monk again. However, he
decided to continue his meditation practice. The second monk suggested a monastery more amenable to English speakers, and Suelo took a third-class train to the mountains and enrolled in a monthlong training. He meditated in lotus position ten hours a day. No solid foods were eaten after noon. The teachers forbade extraneous conversation.

Suelo proved a headstrong pupil. Lotus position was so painful, and boring. When after a week he complained to Tanach and Kate, the teachers, Tanach replied, “Ah, you’re trying too hard.”

“You give me these assignments and instructions and then tell me I try too hard? I’m exhausted and I feel sick.”

“That’s good,” said Tanach. “Mental and physical toxins are coming out.”

Suelo was frustrated. One day instead of meditating he lay down and slept. He resented the hierarchy of the place. The monks just stood around smoking and chatting all day while the nuns cooked their meals. During services, the monks sat on the elevated stage, the pupils sat on the floor, and the nuns sat in back. And then the priest talked about how this particular monastery had a direct lineage to the Buddha himself, that it was the only true Buddhism, and the others were frauds. Suelo felt like he was back in the Plymouth Brethren. Three weeks into his training, he packed his bags, stormed into Tanach’s office, and announced that he was leaving.

“You forgot to bow to the Buddha.”

“I don’t want to bow to the Buddha.”

“Why?”

“It’s just a statue. The only reason I’m doing it is to please you. It’s not out of truth, or out of my heart. And besides, bowing to the Buddha is contrary to the teachings of the Buddha.”

Tanach considered this for a moment.

“I agree with you,” he said. “Maybe you can think that you’re bowing to the Buddha within.”

Tanach convinced Suelo to stay. The meditation improved. One day he felt bliss, the next day sick and frustrated. “You’re learning the impermanence of all things,” said Tanach. “Yesterday you were on cruise control, now you’re not. That’s entering high wisdom.”

Then the instructors told Daniel to start reducing his sleep. Stay up later, get up earlier. “That was the hardest part,” he says. “I also felt tired, didn’t deal well with fatigue. The last thing I wanted to hear was to
sleep less
. But I stuck it out until finally they told me: no sleep at all. Stay awake all night in walking and sitting meditation.”

The point of the meditation was to always return to the present moment. That night Tanach gave him a koan—a phrase to meditate upon: “Vow to find what you’ve never experienced or seen before, or never will again.”

As Suelo sat in lotus, thoughts from his long-lost Christianity began to surface. “I started thinking about growing up, my childhood, my feelings, the intense peace I found in my religion: I’d thrown it all out together. But I couldn’t deny that intense peace at the core. What touched me at my deepest soul was my own religion.” He recalled Jesus’s words: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Suelo wasn’t the first to notice that Christ’s teachings about humility, forgiveness, and contemplation were pretty similar to those of the Buddha. And this idea of living in the moment dated back further than either: the word “Yahweh,” the Hebrew word for God, translates literally as “the
eternal present.” Since college, Suelo had known that at their core, all religions tapped the same truths. Now, in deep meditation, he actually
felt
it. But his training was not finished.