Testimony

Namaste. My name is Glennford Ellison Roberts, and I did not set out to write a canon. I set out to know what is true, and I never learned how to stop. That is the whole of it, and everything else — the thirteen books, the eight hundred thousand words, the years — is only what happens to a man who cannot put the question down.

I would like to tell you that I chose this thread and followed it by discipline. The truer thing is that the thread had me. From early youth to these later years it did not let go, and by the time I might have been clever enough to trade it for something more rewarding — a career, an audience, a name — it was too late; the wanting to see had already become the shape of the life. I do not offer that as a virtue. A man does not deserve credit for an itch he could not stop scratching. I offer it only as the honest account of how the work came to exist: not from ambition, which I lacked, but from a hunger I could not talk myself out of.

The books taught me, but they were not the first teacher, and I want to say plainly where the first teaching came from, because it is the part a reader might otherwise think is decoration. It is not decoration. It is the ground the whole thing grew in.

I have lived outside the skirts of the city, on a piece of land just shy of an acre, and I have spent decades tending it. I designed gardens. I put things in the soil and waited through seasons I could not hurry. Over that land a single tree rises some seventy-five feet into the air, and under its presence I did much of the thinking that became these pages. And what I found, slowly, is that the truth I was chasing through the Upanishads and the Gospels, through the Gita and the Ladder of Light, was already speaking to me out of the ground. The same structure that appeared in the myths appeared in the growth of evergreens. The same patience the Gita teaches is the patience of watching a thing rise that will not be rushed. The same silence the Upanishads describe is the silence of land at the edge of a city. I did not read the perennial and then go looking for it in the world. The world had been saying it to me the whole time, in a language I only later learned to read in books.

So when I tell you the gardens and the tree and the soil are metaphysics made visible, I am not reaching for a pretty figure. I mean it as flatly as a man can mean anything. The climber’s path is a thing I walked in scripture and also a thing I walked in dirt, and it led to the same place both times. A person who tends land for long enough learns what the sages wrote, whether or not he has read them. I had the strange fortune of doing both, and of discovering that they were one lesson.

I did not chase an audience, though I will not pretend that was righteousness — I simply never had the gift for it, and the thread left me no attention to spare for a persona even if I had wanted one. I did not want followers. I am not sure I would know what to do with them, and I am certain the wanting of them would have bent the work out of true. What I wanted, the only thing I ever really wanted, was to see — to find out whether an eternal truth exists, and whether a man is permitted to look at it if he is willing to set down everything that stands between the eye and the real.

And I will tell you what I have found, carefully, because this is the one place in the whole volume where I speak in my own voice and I will not overstate it. I have not reached a summit and I do not write from one. I write from the climb, which is the only honest place to write from, and I distrust anyone who tells you otherwise. But I have followed the thread through scripture and through suffering and through work and through the land and through the length of a life, and it has led to the same place every time. Not to a doctrine. Not to a system I could hand you. To a seeing — and to the beginning of a laugh.

That laugh is the thing I would leave you with, because it is the reward, if there is one, and it is not the reward I expected.

There is a moment — I have touched its edge, I will not claim I live inside it — when the symbol you have been clutching finally drops, and the referent it was pointing at the whole time simply stands there, plain, and you realize with something between shock and hilarity how simple it always was, and how long you spent making it hard. The old traditions know this laugh. It is the Buddha’s laugh, and it is not mockery and it is not triumph. It is the laugh of recognition — the sound a person makes when the ego lets go for a moment and the thing it was hiding turns out to have been there all along, waiting, needing nothing from you but that you finally stop performing and look. I did not build this canon to make anyone believe me. I built it because I could not stop looking, and because now and then, in the books and in the garden alike, the looking turned into that laugh. If the work carries anything to you, I hope it is that — not my conclusions, which you should test, but the possibility of the laugh, which is yours to find on your own land, under your own tree, by your own patient looking.

That is my testimony. It is short because the true part is short. I wanted to see. I looked as honestly as I could, for as long as I was given. And the thread led home.

If the work has reached you — to walk with us, or to carry it into your tongue — you will find Contact in the ribbon above. The hand is open.