In today’s post I’m sharing the painting I have been working on and have decided to let go of so that I may move on to one of the several new ideas urging to become pictures.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a memoir. Over this last decade I have expectedly read several memoirs, each one inevitably informed by the writers’ outlook on life and their value system. This current memoir is informed by Zen, one could say, or to be more precise it is about one man’s life journey while practising Zen. It gave rise to lots of questions, but also provided me with some insights around mediation and the process of becoming more “awakened”; recognition of things I have experienced; confirmation for things that I have pondered on. I found that the book is not heavily loaded with metaphysical conclusions or interpretations of reality and the universe, which added to my enjoyment of it. As Sam Harris has said he’s simply someone, who is making his best effort to be a rational human being, and is very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort ….and that to practice he did not have to believe anything irrational about the universe like the idea that all apparent things manifest as in a dream, for instance, or about his place within it, or accept beliefs about karma and rebirth, imagine meditation masters as possessing supernatural powers….. Finally, I cherished the prose, especially, the descriptions of places and nature.
The title of the book is One Blade of Grass: A Zen Memoir written by Henry Shukman, originally from Oxford (where he studied Greek among other things), an English poet and writer, recipient of the Arvon and the Jerwood Aldeburgh Poetry Prizes, as well as, the Arts Council England Writer’s and the Author’s Club First Novel Awards, He now teaches mindfulness and meditation around the world and in New Mexico in particular.
About Zen and his own long practice or journey he writes: “So what’s it all been about?
First, maybe…….. “early openings” [he is referring to a peak experience that he had on the beach when very young] can cause trouble. If a seed germinates and splits open, it had better have loam waiting for it.
Second, some of us are going to need other kinds of help, along with meditation: dream therapy, cognitive therapy, somatic work, yoga, whatever it may be. The more the different approaches understand and respect one another, the better.
Third, one common misunderstanding of meditation in the West is that it’s an individual undertaking. I fell for that, and fell foul of it. In fact it’s collaborative and relational, at least if you want to make real progress.
Fourth…… There is no inherent incompatibility between Western culture and meditation practice. The core teachings need not be presented as exotic, since they aren’t; they are about the human mind, heart, and body.
Fifth……… Much as I personally appreciate those popular public teachers and their books, I’m grateful my own teachers aren’t like that. I was a lone wolf too long myself, snarling with distrust. That was part of the very problem. Considering that there are lineages of practitioners who have been studying human consciousness for millennia and passing on their findings, why not receive the wisdom of their cumulative experience? ….. They were the ones who had taken the trouble to submit themselves to Zen’s long, arduous training under their own masters so they would have something— the best thing— to offer others. And what that is doesn’t come independent of relationship. It is in a sense the core of relationship, and to present it as an isolated thing that we discover in an isolated way is to miss the most important point of all.
Sixth, there is a process a human being can go through that results in an extinguishing of certain aspects of ordinary consciousness….. In other words, a wisdom that is not knowledge, but rather a state of being. That “wisdom” should be something different from knowledge makes sense, since in this process knowledge is revealed as one of the very screens obscuring what the training uncovers. All that we know vanishes, is seen to have been a mirage, a smoke screen. Flexibility, a sense of support and love, a willingness to surrender one’s opinions, to be open to others as they are, a sense of deep freedom, of things having fallen into place……. of being part of the family of humanity, of living beings, of all creation, which inspires one to be of service— all these are symptomatic of the shift. But it’s not a shift from one state to another; it’s more a shift from a state to a process, ongoing, ever new….
Perhaps the “self” that spiritual traditions attempt to pacify, tame, or even annul is a kind of potential, the seed of a second growing up that a human being can go through. Through infancy, childhood, and adolescence we develop a self that functions in the world. There’s a first wiring of the neurology in the earliest years, then a second wiring in adolescence. In time, often around midlife, or sometimes earlier, we start to wonder whether our view of life is complete, if there could be more. While some may understand that kind of inquiry in theistic terms, perhaps what we are really doing is tasting the possibility of another stage of development, beyond self: not a metaphysical or cosmological excursion, but rather a deep incursion, into experience here and now. Some neuroscientists speak of a third wiring of the brain, an optional one, a shift that the great wisdom traditions foster…..
Seventh, since that moment, life has been different. More peace, love, joy. More grief too, when appropriate, which I take to be healthy. I don’t want to sound beatific or saccharine, and for sure there are still bouts of anxiety and irritation, but they are much rarer and briefer, and bite less deeply. …..
Elsewhere, he uses a bathtub metaphor to describe the meditative process or journey: “Zen training is like a bathtub where the plug has been pulled. At first nothing seems to be happening, but the water is surely going down. We’re a plastic boat floating round, bobbing along, past the rubber duck, along the side of the tub. That’s interesting but no big deal. The water is going down, but too slowly to see. Then a moment comes when it’s clear the sides of the tub have grown taller. How did that happen? That’s more interesting. The perspective is changing. Then the water is noticeably shallower…… The movement of boat and duck around the perimeter speeds up. The cycle around the edge happens just a bit quicker. Then we glimpse a sudden vortex down at the plug hole. It’s a shock. Where did that twisted rope of energy spring from? We might be tempted to stop: now we’ve seen the vortex. Perhaps we’d heard rumors of it, and now we’ve seen it for ourselves…
The tub continues to empty. The journey, the process, is far from complete. Suddenly there the vortex is again, a silver braid spiraling into darkness. This time we’re tugged right into it, with an alarming, heart-stopping jolt. An intense energy strikes us to the core. And we bob out again. But the boat has been broken by the jolt. We’re flotsam on the surface now, and the water continues to drain. Then, with a gulp of the drainage system, we get caught once again in the eddy. We don’t realize it’s happening, then before we know it we’re sucked right down into the whirlpool, through the mouth of the drain, down and down. Total darkness. Life as we knew it gone, devoured by the plumbing, sucked away into the core of the pipes…..
Somehow, through that impossible keyhole, that eye of the needle, we pass into . . . beyond . . . That’s what Zen training is for: to suck us out of life as we know it, out of our self as we know it. All along we thought it was something in the bath we were waiting to have sucked away, but it wasn’t: it was the water itself. And it turns out we ourselves were the water all along……”
