What Happened?
One glimpse through the kaleidoscope
I’ve already asserted I don’t believe a definitive accounting of what happened with Walter is possible.
Imagine a group of people sitting in a circle. Passing amongst them is one of those kaleidoscope tubes popular with children. As each individual receives this from the person before them, they hold it up to one eye and give it a turn. The sight before that eye shifts, offering a glimpse of something no one else has witnessed.
So it was in our community. Pervasive secrecy and compartmentalization, Walter’s tendency to weave different narratives with different students, and a host of other factors conspired against much sense of group consensus.
Even within myself I’ve seen this dynamic at play. What I believe on one day will often have shifted by the next, altered into something a little bit different.
Yet still I give the matter consideration. What, for me at least, happened with that person and that community? The best I can offer in reply is a single word: betrayal.
My dictionary defines ‘betray’ as “the act of being disloyal to.” In many ways, this expresses what ultimately transpired at the end of my twenty year relationship with Walter. He proved himself disloyal to the heart-mission that had drawn us together. In fact, he betrayed this in so egregious a manner that I could no longer continue to be part of his Circle.
Before meeting him, I spent several years as part of the larger community in which Walter had received his own training. Through this span, I encountered numerous senior teachers . These were people, like Walter, who had matured under the guidance of the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa.
With rare exceptions, members of this cohort would visit my town for a talk or a weekend workshop, telegraph an air of separation from those who had gathered, then leave to certainly never return.
Again with rare exceptions, all communicated a belief that, in working with Trungpa, they had experienced something special. And perhaps they had. What was disheartening in this, however, was the fact that what they experienced was never really articulated, never really shared. It remained a kind of secret that kept them, in some mysterious way, different from the rest of us. Hopelessly and impossibly different.
Walter did not replicate this tendency. From the very beginning of our time together, he communicated an intoxicating lack of separateness, lack of specialness, lack of secrecy. “Put meditation at the centre of your life,” we were told quite plainly, engage the training he was going to share with us - the same training he received - and we would come to fully embody this lineage, to impeccably continue this stream of teachings into the future.
For me this was an exhilarating assertion. And I don’t think I was alone in this. In those early years, students rushed toward Walter in a torrent. All of us, I’m sure, had unique motivations drawing us in his direction. To at least to some extent, however, I’m confident we all felt what I’ve described above: the energy contained in that declaration, its promise.
This was the spark that ignited the atmosphere we shared. That encouraged so many of us to orient our lives around Walter and the Circle. It was the flash that inspired us to attend program after program, to devote long hours to personal practice and study, to unquestioningly follow Walter when he departed Chogyam Trungpa’s community to begin one of his own.
In many ways, the culmination of this arrived in the summer of 2017.
One warm Saturday morning, I picked up the phone to hear an excited voice on the other end. “We’re going to do it!” Walter announced without saying hello. The ‘it’ in this case, was the fact that after long discussion and much speculation he was going to empower three of his students as lineage holders: people who would “be able to do everything I do. Pointing out. Abhisheka. Guiding the community.”
Of course I was excited to be one of this number. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. But in all honesty, the greatest excitement I felt concerned not what this meant for me, but what this meant for us. Finally the promise that had long animated our community was being realized. Finally the oftentimes arduous training Walter demanded of his students was coming to fruition.
Coming to fruition, that is, for two of us.
One of the other students to be empowered was a peer who, in his own unique way, had made a journey through Walter’s teaching and mentorship quite similar to my own. Broadly speaking, he had completed the same tasks and requirements as so many of us.
The third was Wizard, Walter’s spouse.
A more recent arrival in the Circle than my peer and myself, Wizard had not followed the same training path as the rest of us. Much of what we were expected to complete, she seemed to bypass.
Though Walter spoke often of Wizard’s special gifts and abilities, this ‘behind closed doors’ reporting was not the same as sitting shoulder to shoulder through many hours of training together. This was not the same as witnessing one another struggle and develop and flourish over a decade-plus span of time. More to the point, this was not part of the promise that had long animated our community.
Still, two of the three people named for empowerment were part of that arrangement. And this, to me, seemed good enough. At least for a little while.
Because less than thirty-six hours after that morning phone call, I received the following email from Walter. “I think I need to take step one this summer with (Wizard),” he wrote. In this way, he informed me only his spouse would receive empowerment in a few weeks.
Though I did not realize it at the time, the instant I read that message was a turning point. When Walter chose to shift from promise to separation, from an emphasis on training that was essentially available to everyone to extraordinary qualities only he was privy to, the fire that had long ignited our work together dimmed. In a fundamental way, he dulled its affecting brilliance by returning to the disheartening sense of separation and difference, secrecy and specialness I had experienced so many years earlier.
This is the most lasting glimpse I’m granted when I look through that continually changing kaleidoscope of memory and reflection described at the outset. This is the most resonant response I can offer that understandable question of ‘What happened?’ For me, a basic and shattering betrayal.