OFF THE SHELF | By Kit Soltz
How to Find Serenity in a Bustling World
In spring this year, Ojai is a pretty little town bristling with controversy and bustling with commerce. Long-term residents grumble about traffic congestion and lack of parking downtown, while the city council is riven by disagreement over short-term rentals. The median rental price of a two-bedroom apartment in the Ojai area soars by the year, and a 1 percent tax on short-term visitor-stays to the valley brings over $3 million dollars to a city tourism office. The office, in turn, reports a startling 417 percent greater increase in awareness of Ojai around the world in 2016 over the year before, totaling almost half a billion views on media.
And yet hidden away from all this hubbub, in a modest apartment in the in the East End, writer Robert Wolfe, a human island of peace and serenity, calmly dispenses wisdom to readers and visitors from around the world. He asks almost nothing for himself in return. Tall, thin, graceful in his movements and unpretentious in his dress, Wolfe greets a visitor warmly, and with great simplicity of affect reveals his secret: “non-dualism.”
Or, in more conventional terms, enlightenment. Realizing indivisibility.
“From the standpoint of the teaching of non-dualism, there is no future, there is no past, there is just this one unbroken moment,” he says. “When you see the indivisible nature of what we’re talking about, you realize that none of these impermanent forms are really significant in the big picture.”
In his most recent book, “The Gospel of Thomas,” about one of Christ’s twelve original followers, Wolfe argues — based on a great deal of scholarship — that the lesser-known apostle, also known as “Doubting Thomas,” may have been the one who most accurately transcribed Christ’s words.
“The early church fathers suppressed a lot of the written material that concerns Jesus and his teachings and it wasn’t until 1945 that the gospel of Thomas was discovered,” Wolfe explains. “It’s unique in that it is essentially nothing but the sayings of Jesus. In those 114 sayings, some of which are also found in similar forms in parts of the New Testament, an awakened person can clearly recognize non-dual teachings. Essentially organized religion is saying that there’s you here and God up there somewhere, whereas non-duality says it’s all one thing.”
Wolfe has long been skeptical of organized religion. As he recounts in a biographical essay posted on his website (livingnonduality.org) he grew up in modest circumstances in rural Ohio and Florida. His mother was a Baptist and his father a professed atheist. His parents divorced when he was a teenager. Wolfe found himself attending services with his mother, but could not overlook the hypocrisy he saw in the congregation.
“I was paying attention to what was going on,” he says now. “I could see there was a lot of difference between the scripture and what was being played out in most people’s lives.”
After working a wide range of jobs — from the assembly line to the carnival — Wolfe, in New York City became a journalist, working first for newspapers and then for The Realist magazine, published by prominent counterculture activist/satirist Paul Krassner. While covering stories as a reporter, he heard talks given by prominent Zen Buddhist teachers, and despite considering himself an atheist, couldn’t help but be impressed.
“Zen seemed to be a “religion” which was intent on putting itself out of business, so I became interested once again in ‘spiritual’ matters,” he writes. Later he found himself admiring Krishnamurti for similar reasons.
As the tumultuous decade drew to a close, The Realist began to struggle. Seeing the writing on the wall, and less and less interested in politics, Wolfe moved to a farming commune in the Mendocino area in Northern California, living a meditative life with a dozen or so others focused on
Zen Buddhism, tending an organic garden and orchard, and raising goats, chickens, ducks and geese. Eventually he married and lived a “normal” life in Mendocino for about 10 years, working as a financial advisor, until his wife left him for another man.
“I could continue to have a career and be a homeowner, but at that point I felt that I was living in confusion, so I decided to make clarity my top priority,” he recalls. “I sold my house and bought a camper van, and lived in the forest on land belonging to some friends of mine.”
In an essay posted on his site about those three years in the forest, called “Enduring Enrichment,” Wolfe recounts how he came to know a handsome, but wild, dog living nearby called “Wolf,” who had been abandoned as a puppy.
“A true lone wolf, he has not come within a human arm’s reach since he was abandoned. I sometimes have glimpsed him following me on my walks, tracking me distantly as perhaps a curious wolf might do. He appears to be alert, healthy and contented. And he is providentially cared for by a source which he is not even expected to pay obeisance to.”
That sort of simplicity and independence spoke to Wolfe. Living alone in the forest, taking walks and reading, Wolfe found the clarity he sought.
“I had an awakening,” he says simply. “It’s not really dramatic, but there was a moment.”
Wolfe decided he no longer needed to live in the woods, and moved to warm Southern California, where he wrote his first full-length book, “Elementary Cloudwatching,” transmitting in words the serenity he had found.
“Being free as a bird can mean to be free to perch unhurriedly, as well as to fly,” he wrote. “Where need one go, in search for peace? Freedom is not at the end of a road, it is not an accomplishment.”
Celeste Gabriele, a good friend of Wolfe’s and a spiritual teacher herself, says that in her experience Wolfe is exactly as serene as he appears in person and in his writings.
“Oh yes,” she declares without hesitation. “It’s very rare to find a person who is not in a hurry and who is OK in their body and with themselves and where they are in their lives. I never heard from Robert ‘Oh I wish I had this or I wish I could do that other thing.’ Therefore, for him, it is perfect.”
Despite not owning a computer, Wolfe has published nine books with Michael Lommel of Ojai’s Karina Library Press, and topped the charts in the Amazon category of “non-dualism” for several years. He says that people often seek him out for spiritual guidance.
“From a standpoint of nonduality, there is no teacher, and there are no followers, so I don’t claim followers. It’s just a fact that people will say to me that you’re different from anybody I am aware of,” he says, calmly. “After 29 years of living this way, I have insight into what is missing from many people’s comprehension.”
Wolfe came to Ojai in part because of Krishnamurti — he was the “mortar” that helped Wolfe craft a spirituality of his own, using the “stones” of Zen Buddhism, although he arrived in Ojai after Krishnamurti’s passing. He recognizes the changes that have come to Ojai, but doesn’t fear them. “There are always threats, but all kinds of threats are part of the impermanent world,” he says. “I see the impermanent world as false, and all that goes with it is part of that world, good, bad, or otherwise.”
Wolfe plans to continue writing his books, and consulting — usually on the phone — with people who come to him for guidance. The changes that Ojai faces don’t worry him a great deal. “Anyhow,” he says, “Where are you going to go that’s better?”
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