Episode #175: Jonathan Crowley, Part 1
Although Asian spiritual practices were only just starting to gain traction in the America of the 1960s and 1970s, Jonathan Crowley was born into a family that was attuned and open to them. His father was involved in the early psychiatric movement in the United States, and was an avid reader of such authors as Krishnamurti, Kahlil Gibran, and Alan Watts, and he also experimented with Transcendental Meditation.
Jonathan’s first experience with meditation came when he was 22 years old. It was a four-day silent retreat led by Larry Rosenberg at the Insight Meditation Society. But wanting to go a bit deeper, he attended a ten-day course at Dhamma Dhara, a vipassana meditation center in the S.N. Goenka tradition. As many first-time students can attest, the course was excruciatingly difficult for Jonathan; by the fifth day he was in tears. Besides the physical challenges, he also struggled with a refrain that Goenka returned to often in his evening discourses, in which he tells meditators that no outside entity will swoop into save them, that they must “work out [their] own salvation.” Having attended Christian schools which preach that salvation can be granted by Jesus Christ, Goenka’s assertion was a terrifying proposition for Jonathan, and one he found himself resisting throughout that course.
Following the retreat, it took months of processing the experience for Jonathan to understand what he had gone through. On one hand, he found the course to be a deeply destabilizing experience, and increasingly felt himself becoming unmoored from conventional society. Yet at the same time, it also awakened in him a deep desire to further explore monasticism and spirituality. “It made me question everything,” he recalls. “I remember at one point asking myself, ‘Well, gosh, should I just put on a backpack and walk down the highway, like, what's my life about?!’”
Still trying to figure that out, he enrolled in a school program that took him across Latin and South America, and upon returning, surprised himself by signing up for his second course. This left him with a better understanding of Goenka’s teachings, as well as a deep experience of mettā on the last day that carried over into his life beyond the center. “I was in this space of applying loving kindness in all my interactions,” he recalls, adding that he would make bouquets and gift them to total strangers. “I felt, wow, this is amazing! I almost felt like I had a secret superpower. Just the mettā alone, I felt like, ‘Oh my God, I can do this anywhere! I can be mindful anywhere!’ I don't have to talk about it, and no one has to know that I'm with my breath and with my sensations and sending that mettā. That was really quite an amazing revelation for me.”
Still, there was a lot left that Jonathan was struggling to make sense of, particularly how he could integrate these profound realizations into daily life. Having attended elite schools prior to college, he had had his fill of highly pressured environments where success was measured by grades. He was by then moving in a direction of vegetarianism, environmentalism, and holistic health, all practices which would seemingly go along with his burgeoning meditation practice. “I remember reading Ram Dass and Timothy Leary about slipping through the cracks of conventional or traditional, or society's expectations,” he notes, adding that the book Chop Water, Carry Wood was also instrumental in presenting the idea of a simpler, less materialistic, and possibly even renunciate lifestyle.
When Jonathan learned that he could volunteer at Dhamma Dhara anytime, he made plans to return. And he was greeted by an unexpected sight: the instructor of his last course was mowing the lawn! Having idealized the teacher as a figure with seemingly infinite wisdom, it was somewhat of a shock to see him performing such a mundane activity. “I was in some ways digesting the fact that the center itself was this just regular place, and I was trying to juxtapose that with these intense, life-changing experiences I just had,” he recalls. As Dhamma Dhara was just launching a sit-and-serve program for volunteers, Jonathan applied, and was one of the first applicants to be accepted.
At the end of Part 1, Jonathan was faced with a big decision: move to the center, or enter an intensive theater program, which was one of his major interests at the time. He eventually went towards the Dhamma, entering a new chapter of his life that continues in Part 2 of our talk.
“I was getting to know that world,” Jonathan recalls, describing how his time meeting students, servers, and teachers was bringing him more profoundly into the vipassana community. “And that period of time certainly had a very deeply conditioning affect on me.”