Day 100 of 100
Day 100, well holy shit. When I started this ride 100 seemed so far away I just kinda didn’t think about it too much. Now that it’s here, I don’t know exactly what I think. Maybe that’s part of the sitting, I just don’t think too much right now. I don’t mean I’m thoughtless…well if you read some of my posts and tweets, you might get that I’m quite thoughtless…I mean my mind is really quiet. Wandering thoughts come thru as they will, but they don’t have any hooks attached to them or they are so small they don’t latch on to anything in particular and just sail by if they come up at all.
I don’t have a holistic description of what this practice did for me. Perhaps that comes with some time away from it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s the case. What I do have now are a bunch of disconnected random thoughts that I wanted to capture. I also wanted to give you something to look at on day 100 since you’ve been reading this stuff from day 1. I also have a photo essay but that’s not quite ready yet.
I started off with these guidelines for myself:
- had some discipline to it
- was beneficial to myself and others
- had resilience or ‘staying power’ (especially when it didn’t feel fun or convenient or the new had worn off)
- was do-able
- was grounded and integrated (as opposed to spacey and disconnected from everyday living)
- was personally meaningful to me
- was adaptable and malleable so new experience could change it
First random bit – I think I followed these guidelines. I’m pretty happy with the way things shaped up overall.
Another one – as mind gets clearer, what also gets clearer is the fact that this practice stuff and mind are incredibly…ordinary. There’s nothing magical and that’s really cool. I totally get Rinzai’s quote now when he says that zen is about “shitting, pissing and becoming ordinary”. Also I like him cuz he’s a potty mouth like me.
Next random bit – I’m possibly more irreverent than when I started…hard to believe, I know.
I finally understand the idea of the string being not too tight nor too loose so that it plays just right. That was with the help of Mr. Phrawg. 38 Special had a little ditty about it too.
Also, it seemed that setting up too much form/ritual put activated a part of my brain that wanted to be in competition with that set form. The competition set up a mental duality . The duality created something I had to drop. Dropping things is a large part of daily practice. Is this circular mind fuck really necessary? Is this what Zen forms/precepts are about in the first place?
The last bit for now is my observation of the process (more about that in my photo essay as well). A lot of the daily grind that I watch myself go thru is caused by a buildup of mental toxins like poisons flowing into a pond. Individual worries, concerns, fears, pushings, pullings all leave one or more drops of poison in the pond. Chronic habit energies are like poison pumps into that pond. A lot of regular zazen cleaned the pond out and then shut down the pumps by de-energizing them. Remember that bit about not attaching to wandering thoughts…it takes their energy away and they shrink up.
Well, whatever the case, that’s my first thoughts on this process I put myself thru. I find that my larger desire to re-establish a regular sitting practice was completely successful, so I feel like no matter what else happens, I got what I was looking for.
Ok, gonna stop for now as this is already TLDR (too long didn’t read).
Day 98 of 100 – Genjo what?
Over the years I have been a spiritual vagabond, I’ve had this unspoken feeling in me that as a human, I am the perfect intersection of spirit and matter. I don’t think I would have ever put that into those exact words until recently, but that is the gist of how I felt. Maybe ‘spirit’ would be more like whatever I could not see or understand. It didn’t matter what I didn’t know about it, it was very much present and not in some obtuse way, but like something in my cells or dna. I can feel it, I just don’t know how the equation works to unlock it…yet.
There has been something about Zen that seems to address this for me in an unspoken way. That’s probably why I was so drawn to Zen as opposed to anything else, because it got me at that non-verbal level in my bones.
In what I’ve studied up to now (in books, not zazen) this idea has mainly been hinted at like words swirling around a black hole in space. A thing only discovered by the effect it has on other things.
Ok, so I told ya that to tell ya this:
Recently my Zentor recommended a book to me…Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura. It is a study of this pithy bit of Dogen’s work and I’m finding it quite awesome (and I’m only on page 38). 
It’s got the feel of one of those kinds of books you read many time and study…some of the pages are getting weak from the amount of highlight ink I’m putting on them.
The reason I’m mentioning it now as opposed to just doing a single review is because early on, he hit the nail on the head regarding my spirit/matter thing I talked about above. Okumura starts the book off by analyzing the kanji Dogen used to write the title, Genjokoan, with. Apparently Doggie Diddles made very particular choices in the characters he used and they were not the everyday choices, either.
Anyhoot, I normally find this kind of analysis quite boring as shit, but Okumura actually held my interest. He works the word koan down to a definition based on the particular kanji Dogen uses and this is where the quote comes in that this post is centered around.
…the word koan expresses the reality of our own lives; we are the intersection of equality (universality, unity, oneness of all beings) and inequality (difference, uniqueness, particularity, individuality). Reality, or emptiness, includes both unity and difference. –Shohaku Okumura
This struck me as significantly as when I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Heart Sutra form/emptiness phrase as “wave is water, water is wave…” The two quotes really help me validate what feels like one of the squishier bits of the Buddhist teachings and that’s Dirty Dharma, baby.
I’m nowhere near done with this book. In fact, I’ve only scratched the surface, but I already have to recommend it. Put your paws on it if you can.
Day 78 of 100 – An Experiment
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking about the aim of zazen meditation being the quieting down of the neural net of the brain lately. Suzuki Roshi suggests meditating with no gaining thought…no holding on, no expectations, no goal, etc. But it occurred to me that when I sit with a timer for my meditation, I do have a gaining thought, a goal…getting to the end of the meditation, wondering when the bell is going to sound, etc.
So for today’s first meditation, I ran a stop watch app rather than my timer app. I wanted to see how long I would go without a predetermined ending. I would stop sitting when I felt “done”, but I had no definition of done. I just sat. I used my Zentor’s instruction of resting in awareness. That was all I did. No timer. No set end point. No goal. No gaining thought.
What a total mind blower! Meditating this way changed the entire energy of my sitting. I was able to just sit…shikantaza…didn’t have to cut my eyelids off or nothin like you know who in the pic.
The space it opened up was like a breath of fresh mountain air while looking out over huge blue skies.
Cool shit.
Day 35 of 100
Wow, over a third of the way there. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m finding more about what I’m not lately. This theme continues to be something to ponder. When I said in last post that I’m exploring who I am in negative space I don’t think I was painting the right picture. What I mean is that my practice is flushing out so much that I frequently feel like a blank piece of paper or an empty cup. The question is what do you do with all that space?
I was having a conversation recently in which this very topic came up unexpectedly. My massage therapist also practices Zen and out of the blue he started talking about his concerns about being so free of attachment that he feared becoming nothingness. I asked if his fear was of becoming beige, the dullest color of all. He confirmed that to be the concern he was having and it completely echoed my own curiosity about this practice. I asked him to write a guest post on the topic and I’ve got my fingers crossed that he’ll do it.
I do not have a fear of becoming beige (well I’m a fag, it would be electric beige like the gal in Precious). I can’t spell out exactly why that is. The evidence for me comes from a diffuse sense that beige is not what we are about. If non-attachment were boring, the Dalai Lama’s clothes would be more subdued and he’d not giggle all the time. Brad Warner would never use the word fuck (neither would I for that matter). Dharma Punx would be Dharma Curmudgeons. My Zentor (zen mentor) would not have pictures of himself laughing as his avatar. All the wordy Buddhist teachers would not write so many effing books. Pema Chodron would not crack jokes…etc.
My sense of this is that the fear of being beige is an inkling that the Self is starting to go away. As the page begins to get more empty, I fear that with no scenes written, no dialogue, no pictures of my life, that I will just not be there and this would be no good? No good? Really? Actually my sense of it is that this is great because I can write new lines now that I choose. They will get written line by line as life comes. I imagine it like dumping out my programming and writing new code. Well maybe not exactly that fresh. I think the ‘paper’ is still me and my body and there’s some of that that just ain’t gonna change or if it does, it’s gonna be slow.
