Article: Through the Gateway: Remembering Robert Thurman
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
It was the summer solstice at Menla, the retreat center in New York’s Catskill Mountains. I was there to teach a retreat called The Wisdom Path—a workshop Robert Thurman and I had planned to teach together. Instead, I was teaching alone.
After Bob’s sudden death just days earlier, Laura Chandler, who was traveling with me and supporting the workshops, suggested that we invite our dear friend Thupten Jinpa to offer a few reflections about Bob’s life and a brief teaching on the idea of the Wisdom Path. He graciously agreed and as I sat listening to Jinpa’s comforting voice fill the conference center, I found myself surrounded by reminders of Bob.
Towering thangkas of Tibetan Buddhist deities hung from the walls, just as they had during the countless teachings Bob had given in that room over the years. Outside, butterflies gathered around shallow pools in the dirt road. Foxgloves framed the great stone Buddha overlooking the grounds Bob had walked so many times, while bees moved lazily through blooming milkweed in the summer sun. Inside and out, life felt impossibly vibrant.
Then Jinpa said something that stopped me. “A large part of our experience of the world is mediated by our Mind … In this way, the mind is like the gateway through which we experience the world.”
As he spoke, my own mind began sorting through twenty years of memories with Bob. One memory surfaced. Then another. Each revealed a different facet of the man I had been privileged to know: brilliant scholar, joyful teacher, fearless advocate, devoted student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, compassionate friend.
The first memory carried me back nineteen years to another summer solstice. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was giving six days of teachings on Lamrim Chenmo—The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. Thousands filled a sports arena for the opening sessions. By the fourth day, when His Holiness plunged deeply into the logic of emptiness, the crowd had dwindled dramatically.
Without Jinpa’s extraordinary clarity as translator, I would have understood very little. And without watching Bob, I might not have grasped what was happening. His grin widened with every new point His Holiness made. By the fifth day, while thousands of seats sat empty around us, Bob was nearly cackling with joy. He wasn’t simply understanding the teachings—he was reveling in them.
Watching him taught me something no philosophical explanation ever could. Emptiness was never, for Bob, a doctrine about nothingness. It was an invitation into limitless possibility. His joy became one of his greatest teachings.
Over the many years we taught together, whether we were exploring the intersection of Buddhism and shamanism or the sacred feminine within Buddhist thought, Bob inevitably found a way to return to emptiness. It hardly mattered what the advertised topic had been.
Sooner or later, he would veer joyfully off syllabus, dismantling our assumptions about reality itself. I often found myself trying to keep pace as he bushwhacked through the dense forest of conceptual thought, clearing a path toward what he called the ground luminosity underlying all existence. Looking back, I realize he wasn’t wandering off topic at all. For Bob, every subject eventually led to the same place. Everything pointed toward liberation.
I recall driving with Bob on a rural back road during one of his book tours. He had just received word that a longtime friend and supporter of Tibet House was nearing death. He asked if I could take him to see her. Someone had given us directions to her house, but each turn led us farther from certainty. The roads narrowed. Potholes deepened. Dead ends multiplied. I drove as carefully as I could while Bob remained completely untroubled.
He gestured enthusiastically from the passenger seat, somehow convinced that every wrong turn was simply part of finding the way. By the time we finally arrived, dusk had given way to darkness. Bob hurried inside. She was frail and frightened.
He lifted her gently into his arms, settled beside her on the couch, and opened his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and read to her for several hours. When passages described recognizing the Clear Light and moving courageously through the bardos, his voice grew stronger, urging her to remember. Remember this. Follow the light. Trust what you know.
He stayed until she fell asleep. At the time, I thought I was witnessing Bob accompanying someone toward death. Years later, sitting in the conference center at Menla listening to Jinpa speak, I realized I had also been witnessing something else. Bob was demonstrating how the art of dying is inseparable from the art of living.
As Jinpa continued speaking about the primacy of mind, another realization slowly emerged. The gateway he described was not simply the gateway through which we perceive the world.
It was also the gateway through which the world changes us.
Suddenly the strange events of the previous ten days came rushing back. Long before I learned of Bob’s death, something had already begun to shift.
As Laura and I drove north toward Menla the week before, everything had taken on an uncanny familiarity. The sunlight seemed unusually crystalline. Conversation unfolded as though I already knew what would be said. I experienced an unbroken stream of déjà vu that lasted for days—while teaching, while eating, while falling asleep at night.
It was not the first time I had experienced such a state. In the past, it had always preceded a profound turning point in my life. I simply didn’t yet know which threshold I was approaching. Now I understood: I had already crossed the threshold of Bob’s passing before I knew he was leaving.
I had come to the East Coast to teach Embracing the Sacred Feminine at Menla, after which Laura and I were scheduled to give a book talk at Tibet House in New York City on our recently published book, Depth Hypnosis: A Path to Healing, Power, and Transformation. Then I was to return to Menla to co-teach The Wisdom Path with Bob.
Those plans changed in an instant. Just days after the Embracing the Sacred Feminine retreat ended—and before either the Tibet House event or The Wisdom Path had begun – the call came – “Bob died this morning.”
In the silence that followed, I realized that every event we had traveled across the country to offer had suddenly taken on a different meaning.
After the initial prayer ceremonies honoring Bob, our scheduled programs at Tibet House and Menla would become the first public teachings held in the wake of his passing. Had these events not already been on our calendar, Laura and I would have been home in California. Instead, we found ourselves exactly where we needed to be—not because we had planned it, but because life had quietly arranged it otherwise. We were there to help tend Bob’s altar, to continue the teachings he loved, and to stand with the community he had built.
At Tibet House, we arrived only hours after the first memorial prayers had concluded. The candles on the altar created for Bob had nearly burned out. With the blessing of the staff, I relit them one by one. As each new candle caught flame, the altar grew brighter, its radiance filling the room. It reminded me of Bob himself. Whenever he entered a room, the intensity of life increased.
The following evening, I walked into the conference center at Menla to teach The Wisdom Path beneath the great thangkas that had witnessed so many of Bob’s teachings. His altar still stood before them. Tending his altar throughout the retreat became part of my own practice of grieving.
We spend much of our lives believing that gateways appear only when we recognize them. Sometimes we enter them long before we know they are there. Sometimes they are illuminated only in retrospect. But gateways do not belong only to endings. They are also thresholds into a larger way of seeing. Bob spent his life inviting people to step through them—to look beyond fear, beyond certainty, beyond the illusion of separation, and into the luminous nature of mind itself.
He challenged us to discover that emptiness is not absence but infinite possibility, that the clear light is never somewhere else, and that joy is not the reward at the end of the path but the very ground upon which the path unfolds. This invitation did not end with his death. If anything, it became even more radiant.
We often imagine that wisdom arrives as certainty. Bob taught something altogether different. Wisdom is the willingness to keep walking into mystery with curiosity, compassion, and laughter. I still hear that laughter. I still see that expansive grin whenever the conversation turns toward the deepest questions. And now, I recognize the invitation he spent a lifetime extending: cross the threshold. The gateway was never something to fear. It was always the way home.
