Sleeping in parks and low class hotels where you use
the sink as the toilet and meditating in doorways at night was a
nine-month reality for Chotok. “I was completely addicted to
alcohol. I had drunk a lot for many years, but it was when I was on
the street that I was at my worst,” he says. Sober for nearly six
years, Chotok is now a certified alcohol and drug counselor at the
University of San Francisco, working with active drug users. He is
also a treatment team member at Sequoia Alcohol and Drug Recovery
Center in Redwood City and the director of PRISM, People Recovering
in a Spiritual Manner. According to Chotok, “Addiction in general
is a perfect metaphor for samsara. The dynamics of addiction are a
graphic example of the dynamics of samsara in general.”
And evolving beyond samsara is the same as evolving
beyond addictions, he says. People who have given up addiction are
people who are able to find life meaningful and satisfying without
relying on mood-altering substances. Generally speaking they are
spiritually evolved. In fact, Chotok says, addiction is an energy
that can be reversed from agonizing misery to blissful liberation
and become the spiritual path itself.
Human beings look for happiness in the wrong places and
therefore find suffering instead. Looking for happiness outside as
the solution for internal dilemmas is how most modern societies
function, or rather, mis-function. “Ex-addicts have the advantage
that they are not enchanted by money, power and possessions. They
already know that they won’t find happiness outside themselves in
material things.” “I talk to people about the suffering nature of
life. The whole human race is in denial about that,” Chotok
says.
Having visited human hell, he can communicate vividly
with his clients, and he is trustworthy to them. He’s been there
and he pulled himself out. And he has come a long way.
His journey towards the Dharma and his meeting with
Lama Yeshe started with a car accident at age eighteen. Narrowly
escaping death, he experienced a vision of clear light. And a year
later, in Morocco where he was poisoned by a powerful dose of
Belladonna without his knowledge, he had a clear visualization of
the Kalachakra mandala in the sky. Without having been taught
before, he was able to read the Tibetan letters that surrounded the
mandala.
After excursions to several places in India in 1972, he
eventually arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he met Olivia de
Haulleville, the niece of author Aldous Huxley, in front of a
Mahakala statue at Ratna Park. She told him about a Tibetan lama
giving teachings at Kopan; and his wife Lisa knew someone there
called Babaji, so it seemed a good place to go to. “I smoked two
Nepali joints on the way there to make sure I’d be very receptive
to the teachings,” laughs Chotok.
He set foot in the old Chenrezig Gompa where he was
first impressed by a Western carpet and by the 1,000 arm Chenrezig
statue. A group of ten Westerners were there, including Anila Ann,
Mommy Max, Zina Rachevsky and Massimo Corona.
Chotok was wearing shrouds from a funeral pyre and the
matted locks of a Shiva saddhu. “Mommy Max looked at me as if a rat
had just walked in! And Zina made clacking noises and motioned me
to stand up,” Chotok said. “All of the sudden the door burst open
and Lama came through it like a tank, moving in a straight line. He
was very determined and meant business!”
The discourse was on the two levels of truth. Chotok
remembers Lama saying that the hippies that come to Kopan are awed
by the beautiful sunset, but from Lama’s point of view the sunsets
were ugly because they cause attachment. Chotok was immediately
seduced and thought, “This is the man I’ve been looking for since I
was eighteen. He is my teacher.”
By June 1973 he had left his pregnant wife Lisa and
one-year-old son to become a monk. Chotok requested ordination from
the Rimay lama, Tulshig Rinpoche of Tengboche Monastery in the
Kumbu region of Nepal, because he wanted to establish a connection
with a master who integrates the essential methods of all four
schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
His friend Tubten Pende remembers getting Chotok stoned
the night before he took his vows and reading him stories of
Milarepa. “Chotok was zealous like me but he was able to channel
his enthusiasm into formal structure by taking ordination.” Having
observed another Westerner become a monk, Pende made the decision
to get ordained the following year.
Chotok stayed on to meditate in the mountains, at
Lawudo, the home of Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Wasn’t leaving his wife and
child like this contradictory to the very meaning of Dharma? “I was
at a point that I had to do this or die,” Chotok says. “I loved
Lisa and I loved my son, but I was such an uncontrolled being that
I thought if I don’t become a monk I’d lose it. I was scared. It
appeared to me that if I didn’t take this opportunity, my life
would be worthless.”
And he felt he needed strict training to get as far as
possible in meditation. In the first couple of years he meditated
on the lam-rim, spending from May to October up in the caves and
the winter down in the valley at Kopan, or on pilgrimages in India,
to Bodhgaya for example where His Holiness Dalai Lama gave a
Kalachakra initiation in January 1974.
A group of fourteen of Lama Yeshe’s students took
ordination in Bodhgaya then, among them Pende, forming the
beginning of Lama’s Western sangha, the International Mahayana
Institute (IMI). In the Spring of that year at Kopan, Lama Yeshe
gave the first Heruka Vajrasattva initiation to his students. “I
went back to Lawudo and did this retreat. It was the first secret
mantra practice that any of us had ever done,” Chotok says.
In only two weeks his mind underwent changes, he says.
In one session particularly he remembers realizing that delusion is
the root of all suffering, not just in his own mind but in the
minds of all beings, and that sentient beings are not inherently
bad, just ignorant. “I started to weep like I have never wept in my
life,” he says.
The next year, Chotok did a Mahakala retreat, and
during it he composed stanzas of 108 lines in praise of Four-armed
Mahakala. He requested Lama Yeshe to make Four-arm Mahakala the
protector of the IMI. Lama Yeshe accepted, saying he had thought
before about this aspect of Mahakala being the most suitable
protector for his Western sangha.
Chotok held his vows as a monk for six years exactly.
By 1978, he had been appointed director of Wisdom Publications by
Lama Yeshe, and was living at Manjushri Institute in the north of
England. Towards the end of this period, he says, he was struggling
to reconcile his sense of who he was with the lifestyle of a monk.
Recurring frustration debilitated his contentment with living in
these vows.
“I longed for intimate physical contact with women
again, but there was also something deeper going on,” he says. “I
felt that my ordination had become a hindrance, a barrier,
preventing me from deeper communication with people.” They would
put him on a pedestal because of his robes, asking questions about
meditation and philosophy, for example, but not opening up about
their emotional problems. “I felt stifled and unfree.”
He expressed his concerns to Lama Yeshe, whose advice
was to renounce his vows and live as a lay person. Lama predicted
that his practice would become more powerful this way, whereas if
he remained ordained, he would become more confused. The decision
was made.
After Chotok disrobed, in 1979, he lived again with
Lisa and his two boys in Nepal. I n 1982 he went to Dharmasala and
did a 63-day chulen retreat Taking the Essence a
fasting retreat where one takes only three herb pills a day. “It
was my most significant retreat ever. I felt that I really got
somewhere with meditation.”
He was given the instructions by Lama Yeshe in what was
essentially a samadhi retreat based on the practice of vajra
recitation in the completing stage of the Guhyasamaja tantra. And
one afternoon he was given a commentary on the ten kilayas in the
mandala of Guyhasamaja by His Holiness Ling Rinpoche. “He very
graciously gave me some of his precious time.”
By the forty-ninth day of his retreat, Chotok says, his
meditation had reached a level that he’d never dreamt possible.
“The boundaries between meditation and non-meditation completely
vanished. In fact, my post-meditation session the times out of
meditation became even more powerful than the meditation session
itself. The illusory nature of all universal phenomena was
extraordinarily vivid. Everything appeared as vision.
“During this period, the last two weeks of the retreat,
I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility to take care of my
wife and children. I envisaged exactly how I would be able to do
it.” For the next five years Chotok tried to make his vision
reality. The work he had chosen was very lucrative but highly
dangerous and stressful. Increasingly he used cocaine, alcohol and
various opiates to deal with the intensity of his life.
Inevitably, his relationship with Lisa fell apart. And
in 1987 he was given a day to leave Nepal. Because of his efforts
to help a young Russian woman defect to the West, he attracted the
wrath of the KGB. “My life was in danger, there was no doubt. I was
taken to the airport under escort by four US marines and put on a
plane to America.”
He had nothing, only his prayer books. “I tried to live
again with my family in Salt Lake City, but it was impossible. I
nearly went insane.” He tried to live at Vajrapani Institute, Lama
Yeshe’s center in northern California, “But I was in serious
culture shock. By now I was completely dependent on alcohol. All I
wanted to do was drink.”
“I was in crisis. I was experiencing deep conflict
about myself as a Dharma practitioner and how I fitted into the
world. I didn’t know how to put these two together.
“I got to the point where I didn’t want to think any
more, I didn’t want to feel any more, I didn’t want to live any
more, I didn’t even want to breathe.”
By now he was in San Francisco, on the streets, and he
literally could do nothing but drink. “The addiction was
overpowering and I drank with abandon, insatiably. I wanted to
drink all the alcohol in the universe.” As the months of
unrelenting pain went on, witnessing people get shot and stabbed
next to him, Chotok felt he was close to his own death and prayed
for a sign.
The very next day an insane man tried to pick a fight
with him. “He had cocaine-psychosis, his eyeballs were bulging out
of his head, all his hair was standing on end, and he was
completely out of his mind. He tried to fight with me. Even though
he’d never seen me before, I was the object of his rage. I watched
that like a movie and saw him he was black as a manifestation
of Mahakala.
“I took it as a sign and decided that I didn’t want to
die that way. It wasn’t the way to repay the kindness of my
teachers,” Chotok says.
He remembered a dream that he had during his fasting
retreat in which he met Lama Yeshe. “We were walking through the
deserted streets of San Francisco. I took Lama to an elegant
restaurant and offered him eight golden coins. He was very pleased.
And we talked about finding a way to fulfill my Mahayana vows in
this kaliyuga, the dark ages.”
And he recalled an occasion in 1977 this time it
wasn’t a dream when he was walking with Lama Yeshe in the desert
near Yucca Valley in southern California. Chotok asked Lama if the
present kaliyuga is really as negative as the Kalachakra Tantra
describes it. Lama looked up in the sky and whistled and then spat
on the ground and said, “Of course! You’re a perfect example of
kaliyuga. If you had been born in Tibet you would have been trained
at a young age and would be an object of refuge. But because of
these degenerate times you were born in America and even your
friends think you’re garbage.” And then Lama turned around and
walked away.
Chotok took himself off the streets and put himself
into detox. He almost died, and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis
and transferred to a hospital.
From there on his life’s graph went uphill. He found a
cheap room and got a job with a computer company. This helped him
to get back on his feet, and soon one of his teenage sons came to
live with him. After two years purchasing computer parts, Chotok
felt the strong desire to share his experiences as a recovered
addict, to help others with the same struggles. He started working
in the field of chemical dependency, went back to school and got
certified. Now he is working for his master’s degree in social
work.
Chotok teaches the Four Noble Truths and meditation to
addicts the majority of whom are not street people, he points
out. Many in fact are famous athletes and successful business
people.
“The meditation that I teach them at the beginning,
middle and end is inner fire, the seed-syllable meditation, which I
originally learned from Tulshig Rinpoche, and which Lama Yeshe
encouraged us to do,” he says. “This meditation speeds recovery
from acute withdrawal symptoms to post-acute withdrawal symptoms.”
It has the power to burn addiction, he says, as it deals with the
subtle energy channels and winds and induces a healing effect upon
the nervous system. It opens people’s minds to wisdom and clear
light, thus dissolving neurosis. The vase breathing, an important
part of the meditation, calms the thoughts.
Some Dharma practitioners think there is no harm in
smoking marijuana, for example. But Chotok doesn’t have much good
to say for it. “It is important that the central channel of our
subtle nervous system is clean and clear, and if you smoke dope you
are gumming everything up. When you start smoking you feel it makes
you high, but soon you feel stupid. In fact, it strengthens
delusions.”
“He is the most knowledgeable person about meditation
in our organization, says Internship Supervisor and Aftercare
Director of Sequoia Alcohol and Drug Recovery Center Martha Dunn.
He is very compassionate, very intuitive and has a knack for
working with addicts. And he is good at facilitating and listening
to people…they hear what he’s saying.”
Chotok also teaches people the techniques of exchanging
themselves for others, to take on the suffering and pain of others,
especially the meditation called Giving and Taking Upon the Breath.
This really helps open channels of communication, he says. “People
trust me, they do what I tell them to do. I personally have
compassion for them and I tell them to do the same.”
“The average person does not want to cause suffering.
People instinctively want to practice. You don’t hit them over the
head by telling them “this is Buddhism’ you just tell how things
are.”
During his three years of meditation in the caves of
Nepal, Chotok says he made prayers and dedications to be of benefit
to sentient beings in whatever way necessary, and not to fear
samara’s deepest and darkest pits. He feels his prayers have been
answered in the work he is doing now, which is because of his
experiences on the streets.
“I can say in perfect confidence that people are
helped,” he says, explaining that his confidence derives from
relying upon the Dharma taking teachings, meditating on them, and
beginning to feel comfortable about their meaning.
“We practitioners of Tibetan Dharma are refugees from
Tibet who transmigrated from one existence to the next. Our
struggle is to find the yearning for our spiritual heritage from a
previous existence in an environment whe re social values are
rooted in materialism,” he says. “The truly miraculous thing is
that the migrators are able to bring the Dharma to people who
haven’t met the Dharma before. The ineffable joy of this is that
we’re able to see how true the teachings are.”
Chotok feels he has found his peace. “I think it took
the extreme intensity of my experiences, that vengeance upon
myself, to finally find out how to fit into life, how to
incorporate my obligations as an even nominal Dharma practitioner
into this Western society. I have found harmony between my inner
self and what I am doing in the world.”