The Rainbow Tunnel
I’ve talked about some of the reasons I chose Eknath Easwaran as my spiritual teacher. For instance, he’s my mother’s favorite religious writer and he was sympathetic to animal rights, my political priority. One thing I haven’t mentioned, though, is his work is filled with references to the San Francisco Bay Area, a place I lived from 1996 to 1999. Coincidentally, these were the last three years of his life.
When Easwaran died, I remember my mother being tremendously sad she’d never gone to meet him at his ashram in nearby Tomales. I’m not sure why she didn’t. Like me, she doesn’t relish social interaction. I wonder if she felt guilty because she wasn’t meditating. That was a big emphasis for him and while she’s tried it at various times in her life, it didn’t stick.
Regardless, because we lived near Easwaran, I recognize many of the locations he talks about and have nostalgia for them. For instance, on a number of occasions, he discusses what’s now known as the Robin Williams Tunnel. When I was there, it was called the Waldo Tunnel, but was popularly known as the Rainbow Tunnel, as Easwaran notes.
“In the hills of Sausalito just north of the Golden Gate Bridge is a tunnel, called the Rainbow Tunnel ever since someone painted a rainbow over the arched entrance, through which Highway 101 snakes on its way north,” he writes in Love Never Faileth, which features commentary on texts by Saint Francis, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and Mother Teresa.
Easwaran uses the tunnel as a metaphor for reducing self will. “We have to cut tunnels like this through our likes and dislikes,” he writes. “Each tunnel can take months of hard labor; sometimes we have to endure long periods of frustration. You keep on trying to tunnel through the mass of habit, defying old desires, and for a long time you find no evidence that anything is happening.”
Easwaran says, sometimes, for a really big compulsion, this tunneling can take years. As someone whose progress is a lot slower than I’d like, I find this outer range reassuring. Easwaran uses the landmark in service of another metaphor in To Love is to Know Me, the third book in his three-volume commentary on the Bhagavad Gita.
“Just north of the Golden Gate Bridge is a tunnel called the Rainbow Tunnel, through which Highway 101 passes on its way to and from San Francisco — four lanes in, four lanes out,” he writes. “The gate of life and death is like that: coming from one direction we are born; passing in the other we die.”
My father got his first principal job at a school in San Francisco. He and I would drive through the Rainbow Tunnel twice a day as part of our commute. I have fond memories of everyone honking their horns to hear the echoes. My friends insisted that if you didn’t hold your breath all the way through, something terrible would happen. I can’t recall what.
But most of all, I remember emerging from the darkness to a breathtaking view of the Golden Gate Bridge enveloped in fog. Occasionally, I like to imagine Easwaran and I were in that tunnel at the same time, driving to San Francisco.