The Door That Opened While I Wasn’t Looking

Notes on a Life That Kept Arriving Without Me

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I want to say this plainly, before the essay does anything else: I did not build what I now stand inside of. I want to resist, right at the start, the quiet vanity that creeps into any spiritual autobiography — the sense that a life, looked at backward, was somehow earned. Mine wasn’t. What I find instead, looking back across eight decades, is a pattern almost embarrassing in its clarity: everywhere I pushed, I failed to arrive. Everywhere I simply wasn’t looking, something arrived in me.

That is not false modesty. It’s closer to a doctrine, and it’s the one this essay wants to test against an actual life — mine.

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The Ambition That Never Landed
What happens when the version of yourself you were trying to build never gets built?

I grew up doubting myself and covering the doubt with performance — an old, unoriginal wound, but mine. So I went toward the most literal form of performance there is. Acting. New York City. Training, hunger, the particular grandiosity of a young man convinced that if he could just be seen correctly, the doubt underneath would finally quiet down.

It didn’t happen. I didn’t become an actor.

I moved into music instead — recording engineer, then producer, at Douglas Records — and the ambition simply changed shape without changing structure. Now I wanted to be a star producer, someone whose name on a record meant something. That didn’t happen either.

I used to experience both of these as failures. I don’t anymore, and not because I’ve made peace with disappointment in some resigned, therapeutic way. I no longer experience them as failures because I can see, from here, that if either ambition had succeeded, I would have had a much harder, much later, much more fortified self to eventually dismantle. The chase kept missing. That was mercy, not misfortune — though nothing in me could have known that at the time, and nothing in me was trying to fail on purpose. It simply didn’t work, and not-working turned out to be load-bearing.

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The Door That Opened Sideways
Can grace enter through someone else’s gift rather than our own effort?

Here is the part I find almost unbearably telling. The door into a spiritual life — the actual, permanent one, the one everything since has grown from — did not open because I sought it. It opened because one of our recording artists at Douglas Records, John McLaughlin, was already immersed in Sri Chinmoy’s community, and something in that orbit reached me sideways, through someone else’s path, while I was busy pursuing an entirely different ambition of my own.

I didn’t find it. It found me through a door I wasn’t even facing.

Bhakti has a word for this: ahaituki — causeless grace, grace with no antecedent condition, grace that cannot be traced back to merit because it was never transactional to begin with. I didn’t have the word then. I have it now, and it fits the memory exactly: nothing I did opened that door. I was simply standing near it when someone else’s light came through.

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The Years That Held the Longing Without Answering It
What does it mean when spiritual thought never leaves you, but never satisfies you either?

For a long stretch after that, I never actually left spiritual thought — it stayed present, turning quietly in the background of even the most ordinary days. I got married, and wanting more security for the life we were building together, I went to work for my stepfather. But the inner conversation didn’t stop. I kept people-pleasing outwardly, kept avoiding conflict, and inwardly I kept circling the same questions I’d been circling since Chinmoy — I just couldn’t get any of it to produce what I thought I wanted: peace, clarity, some settled sense of arrival I could point to and call finished.

I used to read that gap as failure — as if all that turning should have yielded something by now, and its absence meant I wasn’t doing it right. I don’t read it that way anymore. Spanda — the pulse Kashmir Shaivism says underlies all appearance — doesn’t ask permission to keep beating, and it doesn’t owe anyone the specific fruit they were expecting on the timeline they wanted it. I was, without knowing it, doing the long, slow, unglamorous work of proving — the only way anyone actually gets convinced of it — that the fruit was never going to come from the turning itself.

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The Grief That Would Not Be Refused
Why does loss sometimes open what discipline could not?

I eventually left that business. In November of 1991, I joined Linda — my wife — at the photography studio she had opened. Only months later, in January of 1992, we lost our youngest son.

I won’t pretend to explain this, because grief this size doesn’t submit to explanation, and I don’t want to use it as a tidy hinge in an essay. I’ll only say what’s true: that loss re-energized a spiritual longing that had been circling for years without landing, and it arrived in the middle of a life Linda and I had only just begun building side by side — not before it, not separate from it. That paradox doesn’t resolve. It just sits there, true.

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The Long Middle That Looked Like Nothing
Can a foundation be real even when it isn’t producing what you expected?

What followed wasn’t dramatic. Decades of working alongside Linda in the photography business. Watching our sons grow, marry, become fathers themselves. And underneath all of it, that same interior thread — never absent, never dormant, always somewhere in the room — still not giving me what I thought I was owed for staying so faithfully attentive to it.

I understand now that this is exactly what a foundation looks like while it’s being laid, even when the person standing on it can’t yet feel it holding anything up: unremarkable, undramatic, and — this is the part I missed at the time — never actually empty. I wasn’t absent from the inside of spiritual thought for a single one of those years. I just wasn’t yet able to see that the withholding was doing something the producing never could have.

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Vermont, and What Finally Had Room to Arrive
Why did it take until seventy-four?

We moved to Vermont in 2020. I was seventy-four. And that’s really when it all came together — not as an achievement arriving late, but as a room finally clearing enough for something that had been present the whole time to become legible.

Every tradition I draw from names this same late arrival differently, and none of them frame it as addition. Vedanta’s ashrama system doesn’t say the divine gets louder in vanaprastha and sannyasa — it says the noise finally quiets enough to hear what was already sounding. Kashmir Shaivism’s pratyabhijña is recognition, not acquisition — you don’t gain the Self at the end, you finally stop mistaking it for something else. Jung would say individuation was completing its natural arc, the ego no longer needing to guard so hard. And I think the plain nearness of one’s own mortality does something no discipline can substitute for: it stops letting you pretend you have infinite time to get around to the sacred.

So if I’m feeling Divine Consciousness more prominent now, at eighty, I don’t think it’s because there’s more of it than there was at twenty, or forty-six, or seventy-three. I think it’s because there is, at last, almost nothing left in me arguing with it.

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Epilogue

I keep returning to the same plain fact: the years I tried hardest produced the least, and the years I wasn’t watching produced everything. I didn’t build this house. I was, for most of my life, simply out in the yard, distracted, while it was being built around me by hands I couldn’t see and wouldn’t have credited even if I had. What’s left to do now isn’t achievement. It’s only this — to stand in the rooms that were finished without me, and finally notice that I live here.

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Sources & References

• Bhagavad Gita, on the ashrama system and the natural loosening of desire (kama) and gain (artha) in later life stages
• Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (Kṣemarāja), on recognition (pratyabhijñā) as the retrieval of what was never absent, and spanda as the ceaseless pulse of consciousness
• Bhāgavata Purāṇa, on ahaituki bhakti — causeless, unmerited devotion/grace
• Carl Jung, on individuation as a lifelong process reaching its natural terminus in later life
• Christian mystical tradition (Augustine onward) on unmerited grace, prevenient and freely given
• Sufi tradition (Rumi, Attar) on fana — self-annihilation as the precondition for divine nearness, not its reward