Into the Quiet
I think I had a misconception about Zen. I think I expected that I would work towards enlightenment and I would eventually levitate and shit prolific lotus petals out of my ass, I would be so spiritual I would glow in the dark.
Error #1…”I think”. It ain’t about thinking. In reality and in practice is about training your mind to not use itself until it becomes very still and quiet. I’d say it’s like a lake without ripples. The problem with metaphors is that you have to use your mind to generate them and once you’ve activated the mind, you’ve dropped the practice…which leads me to…
Error #2…envisioning enlightenment and/or spiritual progress. Like what the fuck is that anyway? Again, when I use my mind to generate a fantasy, I’ve dropped my practice.
It begs an interesting question, though…If I keep my mind quiet all the time and don’t activate, I can’t tell you about the experience and I sure as hell can’t write a post about it.
At first I found this a little unsettling. I started blogging about my explorations of mindfulness, Buddhism, Zen, etc, as a way of journaling in public and going through my thought processes out loud. It is a way of processing through the concepts and integrating them. So to find that the practice is opposed to the process of thinking about the practice…it’s…well…it’s just un-American or some shit like that J
The outcome has been that I’ve not written much lately and just let the silence be. It’s unusual and rather counter intuitive to do that, I must say. At the same time, it’s incredibly expanding and deepening. In fact, at times (and without noticing it right away) I’ve found myself feeling like a lake with no ripples.
On Andy’s recommendation, I’ve been slowly (I find that as my mind has slowed down, I don’t inhale books like I used to, I tend now to savor them) reading through Karen Maezen-Miller’s new book Hand Wash Cold and picking a few gems, a number of laughs and unexpectedly, a few tears. One of the gems is one of her favorite quotes from her teacher: “Let’s just see how this goes”. It’s one of those semi-cryptic, possibly crazy Zen master statements that ripens over time. (I recommend this book by the way, if you are a reading type person…it’s like Mom’s version of Brad Warner’s writing style)
So lately I’ve been seeing how it goes. Is it good or bad? Well…it’s life…let’s see how it goes.
