|
by John Horgan
In 1999, a flier appeared in my
mailbox announcing that a class in Zen was about to begin in my hometown.
If I believed in synchronicity, coincidences too eerily meaningful to be
mere coincidences, this flier’s arrival would have seemed a clear case of
it. I had just begun researching a book on science and mysticism, and I
had decided that for the book’s purposes—and for my own well-being--I
needed a spiritual practice. Zen was my first choice. With its
metaphysical minimalism, it seemed quite compatible with the skeptical
outlook I’d acquired after two decades as a science journalist.
A dozen students showed up for
the first class, which convened in the basement of my town’s library. The
teacher, whom I’ll call Sumi, was a middle-aged Japanese-American woman
with short dark hair and a paradoxical expression: When she smiled, her
eyes crinkled, but the corners of her mouth, downturned even in repose,
sagged even more sharply. She looked as though she was being tickled and
jabbed with a needle at the same time.
After we settled onto our mats
and cushions, Sumi picked up a little bronze bell, walked up to a woman in
the front row, and asked, “What is this?” The woman, smiling uneasily,
said nothing. With the same grimace-grin, Sumi asked someone else: “What
is this?” I knew the answer: The bell is a bell but it is also Ultimate
Reality, Nothing, Everything. But I didn’t want to show off, not on the
first night, so I remained smugly silent.
Pete, a rock-jawed karate
enthusiast with a mane of heavy-metal-style hair, brayed out, “Are you
asking, like, what’s the metaphorical meaning of the bell?” Sumi’s upper
body jerked backward, as if buffeted by Pete’s words. Collecting herself,
she spoke haltingly about how the words and concepts we attach to things
keep us from seeing them as they really are. Zen helps us to see
“this”—she held up the bell—for what it really is. Scanning our blank
faces, she added mournfully, “It’s very difficult to talk about these
things.”
True knowledge comes through
meditation, Sumi said, before giving us some basic instruction: Find a
comfortable posture, relaxed but not too relaxed, back straight. Keep the
eyes slightly open, focused on a spot a few feet in front of you. Pay
attention to your breath going in and out. As thoughts, sensations,
emotions arise, watch them come and go without reacting.
Sitting back on my heels, I felt
itches on my face and scalp, a tickle in my throat. I wanted to cough, to
scratch my head, but I remained silent and still, like Sumi. As other
students squirmed and coughed, I felt a pleasant surge of superiority.
After 10 minutes or so, the air glowed and hummed with energy, and faint
auras appeared around Sumi and other objects in my field of vision. Cool,
I thought. Satori, next stop.
At Sumi’s command we rose, eyes
downcast, hands together, and walked around the room, once, twice. A
muscle knotted in my lower left back. I trudged along, listing to the
right, wondering if the man behind me noticed. I watched the short, sturdy
legs of the woman in front of me go back and forth, back and forth.
In subsequent classes, I found
myself becoming increasingly critical of Sumi’s teachings. She told us
about retreats during which she meditated for up to 14 hours a day and
didn’t speak to or make eye contact with anyone else. After two weeks or
more, these retreats sometimes left her wobbly-legged from all her sitting
and averse to any human contact. To dramatize how she felt, Sumi scowled
and pushed her palms outwards, as if fending off a repugnant suitor. What
is the spiritual benefit of being repulsed by your fellow humans? I
wondered.
The goal of Zen, Sumi said, is to
restore us to a state of child-like innocence. She showed us a photograph
of Ho Chi Minh sitting on a beach surrounded by kids, one of whom was
pulling the despot’s beard. This child was acting spontaneously, with no
self-consciousness or anxiety, Sumi said. “Just do it,” she summed up,
smile-frowning. Is this the goal of Zen? I wondered. To regress to the
mindless hyperkineticism celebrated in sneaker ads? And anyway who said
childhood is so great? My young son and daughter had plenty of anxious,
miserable moments.
Sumi told us about a master who
asked a monk “What is dharma mind?” and whacked him whenever he tried to
answer. Why, Sumi asked us with a mischievous glint in her eye, did the
teacher hit the student? I started to speak, but Sumi cut me off with a
loud “Ahh!” Someone else spoke and again Sumi interrupted: “Ahh!” Her
expression was tremulous, triumphant. Eventually she explained the
master’s point: language prevents us from seeing the world as it truly is.
I thought how tired I was of this Zen cliche. How many millions of words
have Zen masters spouted telling us to get beyond words?
Sumi recounted how the Zen
patriarch Bodhidharma went into a cave and stared at a wall for weeks on
end, waiting for enlightenment. He became so enraged with himself for
falling asleep that he tore his eyelids off; this was the origin of the
Zen technique of open-eyed meditation. Bodhidharma used to make would-be
students wait outside the monastery to cull out the uncommitted. One young
man, to demonstrate his commitment, chopped off his own arm. He went on to
become a great master in his own right. Sumi seemed to think these men
were heroes, but to me they sounded like masochists and sadists.
Some of my fellow koan-heads were
also distracting. The worst was Cell-phone Man, so-called because the
first time he came to Sumi’s class his cell-phone beeper kept going off.
During Zazen he also infuriated me by yawning, sighing, and twisting his
head with a crunching noise. When Sumi at the end of our sessions asked if
anyone had any questions or comments, Cell-phone Man invariably piped up,
loudly, as if he were hard of hearing.
Once he told us that something
amazing had happened to him the previous weekend. All the thoughts in his
head began spontaneously turning into songs, and he realized that creation
is nothing more than God turning silence into song, which is really just
vibrations, and, you know, energy. As he related his epiphany, I watched
him coolly, thinking how foolish and loathsome he was. Then I realized how
loathsome I was to loathe him, and I loathed him even more.
The voice in my head kept carping
when I tried to practice mindfulness outside of class, too. Waking one
winter morning to freshly fallen snow, I strapped on my cross-country skis
and pushed off into the woods behind our house. The sky was sunless,
white, lacking features or depth, like the phony sound-studio skies in old
black and white movies. The light was directionless, omnipresent; it
seemed a quality of the air rather than an emanation from above. Every
tree and bush was finely etched, drained of color. The leaves of the
mountain laurel looked not green but black, like wet stones.
Sliding through the trees, my
face pushing through my own exhalations, I thought about falling stock
prices, about a local real-estate development my wife was fighting, about
our daughter’s cold, about my Zen class. Abruptly I realized I wasn’t
being mindful. My monkey mind was running wild, swinging through the
trees, hooting and chattering, and I scarcely noticed where I was, what I
was doing, where I was going. When I did focus on what I was doing, my
thoughts tended to be exhortatory, goal-directed: Push harder. Not getting
enough exercise. Watch out for that buried branch.
Stop! I chided myself. Pay
attention! Be here now! So I stood in the middle of the path, leaning on
my poles, expelling great plumes of mist. I gazed around me at the still,
snow-dusted trees, the gnarled mountain laurel, the animal tracks criss-crossing
the trail. What are those? That’s deer. That’s rabbit. That’s...what,
raccoon? Stop! I told myself again. You’re not being here now!
Then I rebelled against this
drill sergeant in my head. This exercise in self-discipline is absurd.
Every time I order myself to be here now I’m not being here now. I’m
thinking about being here now. It’s self-defeating from the start, like
trying to remember to forget. In heeding the command, I violate it.
My rebellion spread to other
spiritual truisms, to Sumi’s injunction to be child-like. Childrens’
spontaneity and joy spring from their self-absorption and ignorance. What
do they know of death, suffering, the woes of the world? A spirituality
that denies these realities is shallow, escapist. And what’s so great
about being in the moment, anyway? We should revel in our minds’ ability
to range freely through space and time rather than being trapped like
animals in the here and now.
Wait, another voice countered. Am
I just rationalizing, justifying my habits of mind to myself, out of
laziness, or timidity? So that I can stay sealed inside my cozy
intellectual perspective and avoid a deeper confrontation with reality?
As this argument raged in my
head, my body stood silently. Blood pulsed in my temples, beads of sweat
inched down my forehead. A tree creaked, and the chill, colorless air
hissed into my lungs and out again, in and out.
Soon after this episode, I
stopped attending Sumi’s class. I no longer have a spiritual practice.
Return to Table of
Contents
|