REGRESSION

“…five, four, three, two, one.”

“Good. Very good. Now open your eyes, slowly. You feel peaceful. Rested. That’s it.”

The voice was gentle and seemed to come from a long way off. I opened my eyes. Soft light gathered at the edges of my vision, and I found myself breathing deeply, evenly, as though someone had been counting my breaths for me.

A face hovered above mine. At first it was only a blur. Then it sharpened, line by line, until it was as clear as it had been on the day I first saw it.

The stranger from the park.

El Cholo.

I sat up slowly. I had been lying in a deep reclining chair in a small, quiet room: pale-blue curtains drawn against the daylight, a desk, two chairs, a rug laid over polished parquet, a long sofa against one wall. The lamps were dimmed. Somewhere, very softly, a cello was playing Bach.

El Cholo stepped back and settled onto the sofa. He was looking at me with the same expression I remembered from the bench: friendly, patient, and something more than friendly.

“Welcome back, Roshi,” he said. “My name is Dr. Xu Yun. I am your neurologist.”

He paused.

“And your disciple.”

My eyes went to the wall on my right, where a row of cherry-wood frames displayed the record of a distinguished life: medical association awards, a presidency of some research society devoted to clinical ethics. The frame in the center held a diploma from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Doctorate in neuroscience. Magna cum laude.

On a shelf beneath the frames, in a glass case of its own, sat something I could not place: a kind of skullcap woven from copper coils and tiny circuit boards, with padded straps hanging loose at the sides. It looked like a prop from an old science-fiction film.

“What is that?” I asked.

Dr. Yun followed my glance, and for a moment something closed in his face. “An old experiment,” he said. “I call it God’s Helmet. Some people in Washington were very interested in it once.” He turned back to me. “I don’t use it anymore. Certainly not on you.”

“Where am I?”

“You still don’t recognize me. Except from the park in Boston.” He smiled, unconcerned. “That’s all right. The mind is a tricky organ. It returns things in its own order, and in its own time.” His voice softened. “You’re at Mount Shasta, Roshi. You’re home. This is your monastery, and you are its abbot. Here, your name is Xava Xun.”

“Then why can’t I remember it?”

“Because the mind has not decided to give it back to you yet. We have to let it.”

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

“Roshi, you have a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy. TLE. I want you to understand something before you begin to fear it. It is not only an illness. It is also the most remarkable gift I have ever encountered.”

“A gift?” I heard the edge in my own voice. “Doctor, so far all it has given me is confusion and pain.”

“Sit with me. There is a great deal we need to talk about.”

I crossed the room and sat at the far end of the sofa. He turned to face me.

“The temporal lobes,” he said, touching his own head just above each ear, “are where the brain keeps memory, emotion, the sense of meaning. In TLE, small storms of electrical activity break out there. In most patients, the storms bring blackouts, distorted time, hallucinations. You have experienced all three.” He held up a finger. “But in a small number of people, they bring something else.”

“Such as?”

“Some of my patients report premonitions so precise they frighten me. Some see the world so differently that they become painters or writers. And a very few experience an overwhelming sense of union with everything that exists.” He hesitated. “In your case, there is something more. Healing.”

I said nothing.

“I know how that sounds. I have spent my whole life studying what the ancients called the sacred disease. In the 1970s, a Harvard neurologist named Norman Geschwind described a pattern in certain TLE patients: intense religious feeling, an urge to write constantly, a profound sense of personal significance. Doctors still call it Geschwind syndrome.” He spread his hands. “Once you know the pattern, you begin to see it everywhere in history.”

“Where?”

“Moses at the burning bush. Saint Paul, struck down by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Joan of Arc and her voices. Some scholars have made the same argument about the Prophet Muhammad. Others have argued it for Pascal, for Newton, for Van Gogh, for Dickens. Dostoevsky had epilepsy, and he left no doubt. He wrote that in the few seconds before a seizure, he felt a happiness so complete he would have given ten years of his life for it. Perhaps all of it.”

He let that settle.

“A few years ago, researchers in Montreal scanned the brains of Carmelite nuns while they relived their deepest experiences of union with God. Among the regions that came alive was the temporal lobe.”

I raised a hand to stop him.

“Wait. Are you telling me that every spiritual experience in history was a symptom? That Christ was insane? That anyone who has ever claimed to know God was simply ill?”

Dr. Yun looked at me gravely. I had the impression that he had been asked the question many times, and had never once found it easy.

“I am telling you that every experience a human being has leaves a footprint in the brain. Love does. Grief does. Prayer does. That doesn’t make any of them less real.” He tapped his temple. “Show me exactly where the mind ends and the soul begins, Roshi. No one has ever been able to. Perhaps the mind is the soul.”

He stood and walked slowly to the window.

“As for illness, that is only a word for being far from the average. Consider Albert Einstein. When he died in 1955, the pathologist who performed the autopsy removed his brain without the family’s permission, cut it into some two hundred and forty blocks, and sent pieces of it to researchers around the world. What did they find? An unusual concentration of support cells in certain regions. Parietal lobes, the areas tied to mathematical and spatial thinking, that were shaped unlike any they had seen.” He turned back to me. “By any clinical definition, Einstein’s brain was abnormal. And yet who would call it a disease?”

“Abnormal brains also produce monsters.”

“Of course. Abnormality is a door. Hitler walked through one door. Einstein walked through another. But normal only means common, Roshi. It means that most brains happen to be alike. Very little has ever been discovered by the common mind.”

I looked up at him.

“And what makes me so uncommon, Doctor?”

He came back and sat beside me, closer this time, his eyes holding mine.

“You came to Zen late, and as a beginner. Under a respected master, it took you less than three months to reach what our tradition calls enlightenment. Most devoted monks spend decades. Many never arrive at all.”

He rose again and began to walk a slow circle around me. When he spoke, his voice was quieter and more careful.

“But that is not your most extraordinary ability. Like a handful of people throughout history, you have the power to heal. Even the dying. People with illnesses every other doctor had declared terminal.”

“How?”

“By entering a deep meditative state that triggers a TLE event. Deliberately.” He stopped in front of me. “That is what makes you unique, Roshi. Some of your seizures come without warning. But there are others you provoke. Those you can control. Nothing like it has ever been recorded in the literature of neuroscience. And that is why your life matters more than you can possibly imagine.”

He picked up a cup of green tea from the side table and drank, slowly, with complete attention, as if nothing else in the room existed.

“When you do it deliberately, you meditate for one purpose and one purpose only: to heal someone. But the last time was different. You spent nearly two months meditating alone in a cave on the mountain. You pushed yourself deeper than ever before, into a state you could barely control. And when you came down, you came to me.”

“What did I say?”

“That you had to go away. That you doubted you would come back once the healing was done.”

He set down the cup.

“That could mean only one thing. Someone you cared about was close to death, and you had decided to save them. You knew what it would cost. To heal a patient that close to the end, you would have to give away nearly all of your own neural activity.” He folded his hands. “In plain terms, Roshi, you would save that life, and you would become irreversibly brain-dead.”

The room was very quiet. Even the cello had stopped.

“What we were doing when you woke,” he said, “was hypnotic regression. We are trying to bring your buried memories back to the surface, so we can learn who you were prepared to die for. You’ve done well. You’ve recovered a great deal. But we had been working for nearly three hours, and more than that can damage the pathways we are trying to restore. We’ll continue after you’ve rested.”

I had a hundred questions. I asked the smallest one.

“How did I get here? I don’t remember arriving.”

“Claire brought you. Against my advice.” For the first time, something like reproach crossed his face. “I went to Boston to bring you home myself. I found you in the park, and you ran from me. After that, she convinced me to let her try.”

He hesitated.

“There is something you should know, Roshi. Claire has loved you since she was a girl of twelve, long before she first came to us. She is a grown woman now. But you are her teacher. And when you became a monk, you took a vow of celibacy. You must keep your distance from—”

“A celibate monk?”

I said it far too loudly.

“Yes.” He smiled at my disbelief. “Nearly ten years ago, you succeeded Roshi Deshan as abbot here. Under your guidance, Dharma Mountain grew into one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the Western Hemisphere. People come here from all over the world. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has walked these gardens.”

He went on, naming visitors and honors, but I had stopped listening.

None of it seemed as impossible as the simple fact at the center of it all: that an insurance defense attorney had become a monk.

And beneath that fact, lodged like a splinter in my mind, was the one thought I could not pull free.

The abbot of this monastery had taken a vow of celibacy.

And he had fallen hopelessly in love with his own disciple, in the dark, on the cold steel floor of the C-train.