7. ONENESS

How are we educated by children, by animals! . . .
We live in the currents of universal reciprocity.

—Martin Buber

After the trial concluded, I went backpacking up in the Grand Teton Mountains. I had planned the trip for early September, but the trial had interfered, and instead of canceling, I decided to go in late October. I had been told that the snow would be heavy and it could be a difficult trip, but that was the only time I had. So I found a guide, Paul Lawrence, who had done photography work for magazines and knew about the Tetons during the winter.

Paul and I were at eleven thousand feet near Hurricane Pass between Cascade Canyon and Alaska Basin in the Tetons. It was almost noon on Friday, October 21. I was taking in the spectacular scenery—the Grand Teton itself, the snow-covered passes, crystal clear streams and brooks, running falls, icicle falls, snowshoe rabbits, and bright blue skies. At this time of year, no one else was backpacking in the mountains. We were totally alone.

The third day out, I got up early in the morning to fish in a stream not far from our camp. As I walked along, suddenly in front of me a beautiful ermine popped out of the deep snow. She couldn’t have been more than ten feet from me. All at once she appeared with her almost black eyes looking directly into mine. I stopped in my tracks. She sat there staring straight at me, moving not a whisker or a muscle. It seems as if we looked into one another’s eyes for several minutes, but perhaps it was less than one. She turned to go but stopped, turned around again, and took another long look at me. Then she began. She jumped up into the air and did a huge flip, and then looked into my eyes again, as if to say, “What did you think about that?” She did this same trick for me three or four times, each time cocking her head to the side and looking at me as if to ask for my approval. I stood there, transfixed. Then I began smiling and cocking my head in the same direction as hers. This went on for the longest time. There together, I felt at one with that ermine. Finally, when she had finished, she turned around once more and looked at me, then went down into the snow again and was gone.

I stayed in that spot for the longest time, alone, considering the experience. I knew then that it was a profound experience and consider it so to this day. We communicated, that ermine and I, and for those few moments, I experienced what I can only describe as a kind of transcendence of time and a feeling of oneness with all the universe.

I thought a great deal about my encounter with the ermine. But it was to be a long time before I was able to comprehend how important it truly was for me. It was much more significant than it might seem on the surface.

What it taught me was the importance of the experience of oneness. Throughout my childhood I cannot recall ever having felt this fundamental accord with another. Perhaps this capacity was squeezed out of me by socialization at an early date. Perhaps it’s because oneness was not valued or encouraged in my own family—it simply was not within my parents’ worldview.

The first time that I can ever recall feeling this unity with another was in the midst of crisis. I was nineteen years old and a student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. At four forty-five one afternoon, a killer tornado, packing winds of over five hundred miles per hour, ripped through the town. It sounded like a hundred freight trains roaring through the streets, and in what seemed an instant, when it was over, there was a deadly silence. I ventured out from my dormitory, and within just a few short blocks, I began walking through the devastation. The baseball park had vanished. The post office looked as if it had been sliced down the middle by a huge cleaver. As I walked another block, I saw where a large furniture store had been. All of the stories had simply collapsed into the basement, and there was now just a large pile of rubble. It was a numbing experience to realize what had happened to the hundreds of people on those floors. One hundred and fourteen people died in those few minutes; hundreds more were severely injured. I went to work that afternoon and spent the next day and a half pulling people, alive and dead, out of the rubble. I began feeling at one with the other workers, and with the people I pulled out and carried to the makeshift hospital or to the morgue. There was no separation among us in the midst of all that suffering, just a sense of accord.

I experienced this sense again a few years later. Late one night I was riding around the ranch in our open-top Jeep. Mike McDonald, one of my close friends, was riding in the front seat with me. We were traveling in an open field with high grass, and it was so dark we didn’t see a huge boulder in the middle of the field. We struck the boulder and the Jeep flipped. When I came to, I was pinned under the hood of the overturned Jeep, and Mike was leaning over me, his face close to mine. My chest was being crushed, and I could barely get the words out—“Mike, I’m dying, I can’t breathe. You’ve got to get this off of me.” Mike weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds dripping wet. In the beam of the headlights, I could see him gazing into my eyes. He didn’t say anything. At that moment I felt we were two aspects of one life.

Without saying a word, Mike moved to the front of the Jeep where the bumper was, planted his feet firmly on the ground, and picked the Jeep up a few inches. I was able to slide free, and when I was out, Mike collapsed to the ground.

Sometimes the oneness happens between a lawyer and a jury. I’ve talked to many of the best trial lawyers, and they acknowledge that there is often a moment, either in the closing argument or the trial itself, where there is nothing between you and the jury. You’re a part of them, and they’re a part of you.

I recall trying one particularly difficult lawsuit with a young associate of mine who rose to be one of the top trial partners at our firm. At the summation, we were opposed by a trial lawyer from one of the largest firms in Houston, a man who is acknowledged to be one of the four or five best lawyers in the state. His opening, in which he raked my associate over the coals, was scathing. When his argument was completed, I realized that his strategy had been effective and his delivery flawless. But what he had said was wrong, and I felt he was not entitled to win this litigation. I stood up and looked at the jury and laid aside all of the prepared notes that we had worked on so hard. I began speaking straight from the heart and was operating on a level that was higher and totally different from the normal, rational, linear plane represented by the days of work that had gone into my prepared remarks. I hardly remember what I said, but when it was over, there were tears in my eyes and tears running down the cheeks of many of the jurors. We won that lawsuit against all odds. Most observers said it was because of the final argument. All I know was that at the moment I stood before the jury, I had a feeling of accord with my young associate, my client, and all of the members of the jury. As I look back on my experience as a litigator, I realize that my very best performances occurred when I operated at this level. My very worst performances happened when I operated at a purely rational level.

Several months after the trip to the Tetons, I ran into Fran Tarkenton, the former quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings, and we talked at length about connections between sports and the mind. Tarkenton told me story after story about his altered states of consciousness as he played football. He talked about how he would “see” the ball in the hands of the receiver before the play would ever run. He would look at his receiver and call the play, and the two of them would see the play as having been completed. As he would begin to run the play, he would have a kind of clarity that he said was hard to describe. He and the receiver were in complete accord. Things would slow down and be almost effortless. He knew before the ball ever left his hands that it was a completed pass.

What Tarkenton told me helped me to see what had happened in my encounter with the ermine. I had so many deep feelings about that encounter, especially about how the world is fundamentally inseparable. It was so important to me, but it made me self-conscious to talk about it. Instead, I would often quote from Bill Russell’s book Second Wind, which describes the feeling of oneness I had experienced, but in the more acceptable terms of sport:

Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even a mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. … It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.

At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive—which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. … My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

Much later, as I began to comprehend more about what had happened that morning in the Tetons, I was more comfortable speaking directly to the issue. I realized that these experiences of oneness—in Waco after the tornado, with Mike after the Jeep accident, during the jury argument—were all significant; but the experience with Bernadette and later with the ermine were watershed events in my life. The occasion with Bernadette was the first time that an entirely new orientation was involved. It was what the philosopher Martin Buber spoke of as the I and Thou orientation—treating another as a “Thou” rather than as an “It.” Boundaries were transcended in a way we don’t ordinarily expect. This created a new opening for me in my life, an emerging awareness about the impermanence of boundaries and an opportunity to change my whole orientation about the possibilities of dialogue and interaction with others.

When I encountered the ermine, there was also a transcendence of boundaries that we don’t ordinarily expect in our lifetime—a loss of boundaries with part of the natural world. It was as if for those few moments we were inseparably fused. I was drawn into a relation with the ermine, and she was not an “other” to me. I know now that my orientation had shifted, and that was what had made it possible to encounter the ermine herself.

This provided me with new clarity. I had had a direct contact with an aspect of the natural world that my lifelong, fragmented perspective had previously said was not open to me. This forced a shift in conscious functioning and began to prepare me at a deep level to recognize the impermanence and transparency of boundaries in all other aspects of my existence. This shift didn’t happen overnight—it was like a time-release capsule, with the shift occurring over the ensuing years. Over time I came to see that the boundaries we create in this life are imaginary; they don’t exist, but we create them. Then we feel trapped by them.

This type of awareness—sometimes called “unity consciousness”—is natural to human beings, but because of early socialization, we progressively limit our world. We turn from our true nature to embrace boundaries in all sorts of ways. The encounter with the ermine was so important to me because it was the first time I had directly experienced the interrelatedness of the universe.