One summer’s evening in 1973, about 20 of us sat silently in a semicircle in an upstairs room of house on Vancouver’s South Granville Street. In front of us, in a relaxed full lotus position, sat a 50-year old man with a deep brown complexion dressed in a white robe. His long hair appeared to be tied in a complicated knot. To anyone not in the “know,” it might have looked as if we were waiting for him to speak.

We’d have had to wait a long time. Baba Hari Dass is a Hindu monk who took a vow of silence in his 29th year, and hasn’t spoken since. Not that he doesn’t communicate – he responds to questions by writing, fluently and rapidly, on a small chalkboard. Someone at his side reads his answers aloud. After the first five minutes, you forget he isn’t speaking. He’s now 93, living in the hills above Santa Cruz.

Back then, I’d just read, and been enchanted by, the then popular book Be Here Now, in which Ram Das told of his transformation in India from Harvard professor Richard Alpert. Over the course of a year, he had been assisted by this man, starting with their daily 4 a.m. plunge into a snowmelt river at a northern Indian ashram.

I remember that evening well, not for anything Hari Dass “said,” but for his eyes. Before we began to communicate in words, he spent maybe five minutes slowly looking around the group. When his eyes and mine met, something snapped in my brain. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking into me. His intense gaze lasted perhaps ten seconds, but it felt much longer – writing this, I can still see those huge, chestnut eyes, I had no secrets from this strange man.

I lost touch with him for twenty years, until we moved to the San Francisco Bay area. When I mentioned my experience to a friend, she said, “Of course, you know he lives near Santa Cruz now?” I didn’t, but in the next several years I participated in several ashtanga yoga retreats with Hari Dass at the Mount Madonna Center in the near Watsonville. Always, his eyes moved me.

The only choice we had to make at the start of one of these retreats was whether to remain in silence or not. I always chose silence – if Baba could manage not talking for decades, then surely I could handle a few days. To support us wordless ones, the main dining room had an annex, with “SILENCE“ written in large letters across the portal.

One day I was watching deer from the window of the annex when a couple of guys came in and sat down. Talking. Loudly. Obviously I couldn’t go over to them and tell them they were out of bounds here, dammit! I thought of writing a note, but instead started noticing my reactions to their invasion of my sacred space. You’d have thought (I thought!) they’d at least be discussing the finer points of prana breathing or the metaphorical subtleties of the Bhagavad Gita. But no, the topic of their conversation was … tiles. Bathroom tiles. Now my judgmental mind was thriving on making them doubly wrong – not just for talking in the first place and for talking about tiles. My righteousness knew no bounds!

Then something weird happened. My body suddenly and completely transformed from three-dimensional flesh and blood into a two-dimensional wire frame, the wire simply outlining the silhouette of my entire body, from my feet via my navel to the crown of my head and down my back to my feet again. Nothing existed inside the frame – “I” had disappeared. And nothing could touch me. “You have to be really careful with the final grout,” came the words, passing right through, unimpeded by reactions, judgments, memories or “self.” For a few blessed minutes, I was unfettered.

I’ve had many occasions since to recall that magic time. I’ll be on a bus, or drinking coffee in a café, when some wayward conversation floats into my awareness. And off I go, judging, criticizing, commenting. Then comes the happy memory of my “wire-frame being” and usually there’s an immediate and dramatic shift of point of view. The words are just that, words. They come and they go. I can choose to let them pass (I remind myself) unimpeded by the craziness of my mind. And usually – not always – they do. And I’m free.

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.