Next Stop: The San Francisco Zen Center

In a few days I'll be flying to the San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm where I'll be a resident student for a long time. Perhaps many years. At least that's the plan. Who can say for certain. Well, it's all been leading up to this... though, it strikes me as absurd to say so.

Actually, saying anything about anything is really a challenge these days. I've just come off two sesshins and Ango and I'm feeling a little blown out, a bit wispy. Often, when I look at the smoke coming off the incense at the zendo, I feel like I'm looking at the state of my mind. It is not entirely pleasant and I'm wondering if this a natural stage in practice?

I'm rolling with it. The practice continues. And I'm so happy to be participating in Suzuki Roshi's home. Like everyone else, I'm just trying to come home.

And, slowly but surely, I'm giving up on the idea of perfection.

"Things as it is."

PS Tomorrow is December 8th. HAPPY BODHI DAY EVERYBODY!

A Call to Stillness

A Call to Stillness 

We can make our minds so still like water 
That beings gather about us
That they may see their own images 
And so live for a moment, with a clearer--perhaps even with a fiercer life 
Because of our quiet


~ William Butler Yeats

Meditate NYC 2009

Meditate NYC 2009 Kick-Off Event:

Sunday, Nov. 8, 3 – 7 PM Judson Church

New York — Meditate NYC begins on Sunday, November 8 with an afternoon of meditation instruction by Buddhist teachers from a great variety of traditions. The event is free and open to all.

After the kick-off the Buddhist community of New York City will join together to sponsor a full week of free meditation instruction, November 9 – 15. People from all faiths, backgrounds, and experience are welcome at Open Houses hosted by meditation groups and dharma centers throughout the NYC area.

What: Meditate NYC Kick-Off Event

When: Sunday, November 8, 3:00 – 7:00 PM

Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South (on the south side of Washington Square Park, between Thompson and Sullivan Streets.)

Presenters include: Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Michele Laporte, Josh Korda, Ellen Scordato, Donna Walker-Kuhne, Koshin Paley Ellison, Myoji Sunim, Janet Jiryu Abels Sensei, Rev. Dr. Chung Ok Lee.

Free Meditation Instruction at Open Houses Throughout NYC:

November 9 – 15

For 2500 years, Buddhism has taught meditation as a means of cultivating tranquility, kindness, and wisdom. Ongoing scientific research confirms meditation’s positive effects on body and mind. With instruction by teachers from myriad Buddhist schools, Meditate NYC is an accessible way to find out what various approaches to meditation involve and what the benefits are.

Anyone who is interested in meditation is encouraged to attend any and all events. More information, including detailed locations for the Open Houses, is available at  HYPERLINK "http://meditatenyc.org/" http://meditatenyc.org/ .

Meditate NYC is sponsored by the New York Buddhist Council

and co-sponsored by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

That Was Zen, This is Now

I was walking through the meatpacking district on my way home from the zendo last evening.

There I saw two billboards, one on top of the other, which caught my eye:

Blanche Hartman Roshi often says that she really has only one teaching: "Just this is it."

Her student, Jana Drakka, has shortened it to: "This!" 

Even Zen kitsch is "it."

A student once asked Suzuki Roshi: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"

Suzuki Roshi answered: "It doesn't matter."

The Zen of Eugene O'Neill

O'Neill looked directly and didn't turn away.

The clip below is from Long Day's Journey Into Night and it's pretty much the best description of kensho (an enlightenment experience) that I've ever heard:

An Unavoidable Excess of Motion

The image above and the video below remind me of how city life and monastery life are not so different. It's a question of framing, as is everything... and then, maybe, the frame drops away; revealing the "great big 'I don't know' in the sky" as a meditator friend of mine says.



For people with a contemplative bent, everything is in motion and the solidity of things is in doubt. In this way of seeing, is New York really any different than a zendo?

Well, New York and zendos are both filled with dharma bums. I saw someone reading Jack Kerouac's Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation on the subway.

I looked it up when I got home. Here's an excerpt:

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization...

Impeccably Zen

On my way to sit zazen this evening at the Still Mind Zendo, I passed a billboard (see above) from Corcoran which suggests you buy their product because apparently the product is "Impeccably Zen." 

The billboard is on 7th Avenue and 17th St. Still Mind Zendo is on 17th St. Between 5th and 6th Avenue. 

Two Zens. One original undivided way. 

New York, New York.

The Zen of Jacques Derrida

Zen and the gesture of deconstruction are complimentary. In my imagination, I can see Dogen and Derrida getting along smartly over tea. 

Zen and deconstruction are both nondual systems of inquiry. Their objective is to render strange that which we took to be familiar. This is accomplished by reading things against their own grain. 

For example, a deconstructive/Zen approach might say that, ironically, the truly religious person is comfortable using an atheistic mind. 

The mind which works from “great doubt” paradoxically reveals “great faith” because “absolute reality” is “beyond” our egoic notions of “being.” So instead of falling back on our ideas of reference (as "believers" do) we have to let go into the uncomfortable and intimate space of “not knowing.”

This is the practice of Zen. Or, more specifically, this is zazen.

The zazen way is to look beyond ideas of belief. The only way past ideas is through direct encounter of the mind which makes ideas. Through direct confrontation with the dualistic “believing mind,” the Zen student challenges the ideas of a Self which is always present. 

This looking reveals a humbling insight: just as Metaphysics is just another attachment to the craving for “good things,” belief in the idea of an unchanging Reality is heretical. 

Perhaps this is why the Buddha taught: “No Soul.” Clinging to the idea of a total presence is just desire run amok. In other words, it’s suffering. 

Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. 

To use Derrida’s lovely language: presence is always “divided, differed, and different from itself...” 

Acceptance beyond acceptance is therefore needed. We need a rapport and a rapprochement with the discomfort of our lived moments.

This is the way of the mystic.

Returning to the Ordinary World

A koan:

A monk asked Kegon, "How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?" Kegon replied, "A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches."

While I'm certainly not claiming enlightenment, my travels in the East are coming to a close. I'm returning to America in a few days. I'll be resuming the training at the San Francisco Zen Center.

But first I'll be visiting New York. Back to the city I called home for 28 years.

Back to the ordinary world.

In the Chinese Zen collection Wu men Kuan, Chao-Chou asked Nan-Ch'uan: "What is the Way?"

Nan-Ch'uan answered: "Ordinary mind is the Way."

Japanese Zen Master Bankei maintained that the enlightened "Unborn Mind" which is the holy grail of every meditator is, in fact, just our everyday, ordinary mind.

Suzuki Roshi endlessly pointed to the ordinary in his embracing of "Beginner's Mind," while his contemporary, the Korean Zen master Sueng Sahn preached "Don't Know Mind."

New York, like anywhere else, is ordinary. It is luminous.

So I was riding on an intercity bus yesterday and the AWESOME '80's song from Duran Duran called "Ordinary World" came on the radio and it struck me that they were singing a love song to Zen. Here's the chorus:

But I won't cry for yesterday, there's an ordinary world,
Somehow I have to find.
And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world,
I will learn to survive.

A Flight Out of Time: July 25th, 2009

TODAY IS A DAY OUT OF TIME!

Today is called "Zero Day", or the "Day Out Of Time." In a solar year the moon phases from new to full a total of 13 times, in 28 day periods. 13 multiplied by 28 equals 364 days. The 365th day of the year is today: July 25th. The Mayans, Druids, and Egyptians all utilized this system.

So today is a flight out of time. Consider this in light of the Zen saying: "You are time."

Today we can escape from the concept of absence from our own lives by embracing the unknown. By taking a flight that is a flight out of time (as Hugo Ball entitled his Dada diaries) a "flight into the desert (of the real)," into the silence of a poet, we return to ourselves... only to see that we have moved on.

In Pascal's Pensees, #542, he writes: "Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me."

Fly.

Not Knowing

We study the mind to know our self. And, as we know our self, we can begin to let go of our smaller minds, our self-cherishing and self-clinging egos which distract us from our lived life.

But how? How shall we free the mind? There are so very many ways and they all lead to to the top of the mountain (maybe). But this journey of a thousand steps must begin with three simple words: “I don’t know.” Holding the space within ourselves for not knowing, we become intimate with the moment without preconception, intellectualization, or judgment.

“I don’t know mind” is not a return to ignorance. This mind still encounters interpretative thoughts. It ignores nothing. It doesn't suspend itself in confusion or crippling doubt. However, not knowing means that the mind chooses to cultivate a love for investigating things just as they are. In this way, we may find greater clarity and crisp relationship with our experience.

The masters tease us to encounter this consciousness of “I don’t know” because they seek an end to comparative thinking. "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences," they say.

In this way, together, we poignantly experience intimacy.

To illustrate the importance of questioning our assumptions and dwelling in the unknown, meditation teachers are fond of telling the following story:

Once upon a time, a businesswoman entered the Los Angeles airport on her way home to New York. She was exhausted. She had successfully completed a series of meetings and negotiations and was looking forward to relaxing in the airport lounge. She bought a package of cookies and coffee and, along with her luggage, somehow negotiated it all over to an unoccupied table. Sitting down with great relief, she opened her paper and began reading. Soon she became aware of someone rustling on the other side of her table. From behind her paper, she was flabbergasted to see a neatly dressed young man helping himself to her cookies! She was furious but was simply too tired to make a scene. Instead of dealing directly with the situation, she reached her hand under her paper and took a cookie herself. The man paused, but he said nothing.

A minute or two later she heard more more rustling. She glimpsed below her paper and saw that he was helping himself to another cookie. She grew angrier, but simply reached out and took another cookie.

And so it went. He would take a cookie and then she would follow suit. By the time they were down to the last cookie in the package, she was fuming but could not bring herself to say anything. The man looked at her and then looked at the last cookie. A moment passed. Then she saw the young man’s hands break the cookie in two. He handed half across to her, smiled, and ate the other half and then left the table.

Naturally, she was quite annoyed that she didn’t get to eat her whole package of cookies. Sometime later, the public address system announced that it was time to board her flight. She was still simmering over the incident. But when she opened her handbag to get her ticket, she found her full package of cookies intact and unopened. She had been eating the young man’s cookies!

Perhaps it is wise to doubt our thoughts. Things are not always so... we just don’t know.

We just don't know because all things rise and pass away. And so, if I become lost in thought, it is possible to miss the flow of impermanent reality. I do not know reality through preferential ideas of good and bad. I know reality through the direct experience of knowing by not knowing. So I need to greatly doubt the permanence of my assumptions. In this way, I may move away from the seductive naivety of certainty and towards a more expansive and creative innocence of mind.

Sojun Mel Weitsman once asked Suzuki Roshi, “What does it mean to be ordained as a Zen priest?”

Suzuki Roshi answered: "I don't know."

The Absolute Zen of Joel and Ethan Coen

The Dharma gates are boundless and the Coen brothers master them. They're Zen Komuso ("Priests of Nothingness"). Check out this clip wherein their psychopathically precise Chigurgh points to the importance of paying attention to our life:

Stop Being Mindful!

I recently heard a Zen teaching that instructs the meditator to: "Kill the watcher inside." Huh? What about mindfulness?

Forget mindfulness. "Kill Buddha if you meet him on the road." Kill the watcher.

Zen. It's not what you think.

The following is from Muho Noelke (Abbot of Antaiji Monastery):

We should always try to be active coming out of samadhi. For this, we have to forget things like "I should be mindful of this or that". If you are mindful, you are already creating a separation ("I - am - mindful -of - ...."). Don't be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walk walk. Let the talk talk (Dogen Zenji says: "When we open our mouths, it is filled with Dharma"). Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the work work. Let sleep sleep. Kinhin is nothing special. We do not have to make our everyday life into something special. We try to live in the most natural and ordinary way possible. So my advice is: Ask yourself why you practice zazen? If it is to reach some specific goal, or to create some special state of mind, then you are heading in the opposite direction from zazen. You create a separation from reality. Please, trust zazen as it is, surrender to reality here and now, forget body and mind, and do not DO zazen, do not DO anything, don't be mindful, don't be anything - just let zazen be and follow along.

To drive a car well and savely you need long practice and even then you still have to watch out very well not to cause any accident. Nobody can teach you that except the car itself, the action of driving the car itself.

Take care, and stop being mindful!

Zen at War, War in Zen

Any discussion on this blog about the relationship between Zen and war would immediately call into question the title of this blog: "Jewish Samurai." I have never really explained the meaning behind it and I don't intend to.

Sufficed to say, identities like "Jewish" and "Samurai," and even "Zen" are problematic because none of these points directly at our true nature. Our true nature, whatever it is or isn't, cannot be touched by words.

Nevertheless, I do not wish to deny my Jewish upbringing and the karmic causes and conditions which arose from that experience. Nor do I wish to deny the history of the Samurai's (and other forms of militant nationalism) influence on Japanese Zen which unfortunately found expression in World War II. Ultimately, as my ancestors were being killed in the camps of Europe, many leaders within the Zen community were complicit in the rhetoric which enabled the war. Worse still, they twisted the Zen teachings to make the act of war look like the ultimate path for self-realization.

It is said in our circles with excessive pride and self-congratulation that there has never been a Buddhist war. Not necessarily so.

The most comprehensive treatment of this issue can be found in Brian Victoria's excellent Zen at War and this is the most subtly helpful book I've read since Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. If we want to practice the Zen way, we must not look away at anything... especially shadow aspects.

When I sit with this issue, I think the most disturbing and challenging manifestation of this history is found in Sogaku Roshi's and Yasutani Roshi's views--two very prominent Japanese Zen masters whose teachings had a profound affect on the development of Zen in America. They were also rabid warmongers.

Here are some examples of what they said during the war:

• "[If ordered to] march: tramp tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [the Japanese invasion of China]." (--Daiun Sogaku Harada, 1939)
  

• "[The Spirit of Japan] is the essence of the Truth. The Japanese people are a chosen people whose mission is to control the world. The sword that kills is also the sword that gives life. Comments opposing the war are the foolish opinions of those who can only see one aspect of things and not the whole."(--Hakuun Yasutani, date unknown)

• "[Battlefield loyalty, marching and shooting is the] highest wisdom of enlightenment." [This is] "combat zazen, the king of meditation." (--Hakuun Yasutani, date unknown)

On the one hand, this is not Zen. Plain and simple.

On the other hand, this is Zen. Not so plain and simple.

Perhaps the most delicate idea I'll put foreword here is that I think what they said during the period has a kernel of internal consistency with Zen ways... Of course, their teachings' nationalist application was misguided in the extreme and utterly lacking compassion.

The Buddhist way has been exemplified time and again (most recently in Vietnam and Tibet) as a path of non-violence. In the end of the day, the Buddha's objective can be summed up as: "the cessation of suffering." As such, the Japanese roshis rather should have sat, meditated, and allowed themselves to be shot by the emperor for being anti-war, than generate more suffering in the world.

But underneath these teachers' political wrongheadedness, I do detect a "great zeal" (essential for practice along with "great faith" and "great doubt") which contemporary students might reject wholecloth at our peril in favor of an overly-tame Zen. Maybe.

How this form of "great zeal" finds expression in practice is a koan.

Well, for one thing, as a Western student, I'm deeply indebted to zealous Japanese teachings of forbearance (bordering on soldierly discipline). Despite their apparent lack of compassion, the Samurai were undeniably concentrated and devoted. This spirit is immensely helpful in and out of the zendo.

And, I must admit, my practice gets considerable "mileage" when I learn from Japanese "martial" disciplines like Aikido. It is just the nature of this activity to be a radically conducive field for cultivating mushin (no mind), shoshin (beginner mind), and fudoshin (equanimity mind).

Zen is a perspective which extends to all activity. Indeed, Zen is activity. But it is not nihilistic. All activity is interconnected with all beings. In this there is radical freedom and radical responsibility. This paradox is Zen. We can never have an un-Zen moment.

So, with this in mind, one can detect the whiff of the dharma hovering about these serious "mistakes" of the Japanese roshis (no less than the surprising degree and number of sexual scandals in American Zen). By swinging off so thoroughly to the extremes, they show us the Middle Way. And, indeed, I'm writing this post in the spirit of looking for equilibrium having benefited from their karma.

Zen mistakes are fertile ground for recuperative teachings. Recuperative teachings are possible when we study the self. Awakening to this realization is the practice of Zen.

I think this is a strength of the tradition. We're forever balancing, not denying.

In the end of the day, the Soto sect did issue a very strong "Statement of Repentance" in 1992 about the war. And American Zen institutions have dealt directly with the question of sexual misconduct. Neither issue has been solved at all because balance is never achieved. But I think there is wholehearted effort being made.

Apropos, I was struck by something that Karen Maezen Miller said in an interview about her book Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood.

She was asked:

How does your training affect the way you deal with the inevitable meltdown moments of parenting? Can you tell us about a not-so-Zen moment and what you learned from it?

She answered:

Most people think Zen is some kind of altered state; something way different than ordinary. But zen is always exactly you: where you are and as you are. So none of us ever has a not-so-Zen moment. It’s just that some moments aren’t very pretty. When that happens, when I lose it (and I lose it all the time), my meditation training helps me to see it! Namely, I can see that I’m slamming doors, screaming, throwing stuffed animals, scaring small children and making a menace of myself. And once I see it, I know the way to recover. Just stop doing that stuff and apologize. I don’t get into trouble any less than anyone else; I just might get out of it a little quicker.

WELCOME BACK, GRACE!

Dear Grace,

I wanted to express the happiness I felt when I found out you had returned to the zendo.

I also wanted to share my heartfelt gratitude to be able to follow your progress in a most unique way: the SFZC podcasts. Over the past year, Fu and many others have incorporated their love for you into their dharma talks.

Actually, their love was the driving engine of their talks. And this was so palpable and moving... even through the distant medium of an iPod. In particular, I can only imagine how the force of Fu's heart was received up close. I have no doubt that it was as great a help to the sangha's practice as it was to mine.

In this way, the events of your life have literally become teachings.

May you be happy and healthy and may you continue to be a refuge for such profoundly inspiring people.

Deep Gassho!

Kafka On The Introvert's Dilemma

I just read Kafka (excerpted below) on the challenge of solitary living. Ouch.

"Summary of all the arguments for and against my marriage"
(--from Kafka's diary, c. 1912)

1. Inability to endure life alone, which does not imply inability to live, quite the contrary, it is even improbable that I know how to live with anyone, but I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, sleeplessness, the nearness of insanity—I cannot bear all this alone. I naturally add a “perhaps” to this. The connection with F. will give my existence more strength to resist.

2. Everything immediately gives me pause. Every joke in the comic paper, what I remember about Flaubert and Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents' beds, laid out for the night, Max’s marriage. Yesterday my sister said, “All the married people (that we know) are happy, I don't understand it,” this remark too gave me pause, I became afraid again.

3. I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.

4. I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversations take the importance, the seriousness, the truth of everything I think.

5. The fear of the connection, of passing into the other. Then I'll never be alone again.

6. In the past, especially, the person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write. If through the intermediation of my wife I could be like that in the presence of everyone! But then would it not be at the expense of my writing? Not that, not that!

7. Alone, I could perhaps some day really give up my job. Married, it will never be possible.

This Blog's One Year Anniversary

Zen is a tricky business. One finds that there is a diminishing desire to write too much.

Rather than commemorating one year of blogging about "spiritual progress" with platitudes, I thought I'd post some videos about going up and towards mountains.





PS "The only Zen you find on mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

The Zen of Leonard Cohen

The following quotes were excerpted from Shambhala Sun in an interview they did with Leonard Cohen (otherwise knows as "Jikan" [i.e., Silent One] - his Dharma name) at Mount Baldy Zen Center, which, if I may say, sounds like the most rigorous Zen training to be had (they're Rinzai-shu) at any monastery in the Western Hemisphere. Leave it to badass Leonard Cohen to go at it hard-core. Gassho to the end of love.

This "connection—the unavoidable presence of the Other—has driven us to religion," he says, explaining why he thinks "the great religion is the great work of art." We "form ourselves around these problems," he goes on. "These problems exist prior to us, and we gather ourselves, almost molecularly, we gather ourselves around these perplexities. And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity."

"In the zendo," he tells me, not unhappily, "all of this disappears." ("This" referring, I think, to his name, his past, the life he carries around within him.) "You don’t notice if this woman’s beautiful or ugly. If that man smells or doesn’t smell. Whoever you’re sitting next to, you just see their pain. And when you’re sitting, you feel nothing but the pain. And sometimes it goes, and then it’s back again. And you can’t think of anything else. Just the pain." He pauses (and the chanteur/enchanteur slips out again). "And, of course, it’s the same with other kinds of pain, like broken hearts."

On Zen students:

"Everyone here is fucked up and desperate," he says brightly. "That’s why they’re here. You don’t come to a place like this unless you’re desperate."

In exultation, one Zen student proclaimed zazen to be "Better than drugs!"

"Secretly," he told me cheerily, "the sin of pride as it’s manifested here is that we feel we’re like the marines of the spiritual world: tougher, more reckless, more daring, more brave."

"There’s a bias against religious virtue here," he assures me, grinning one morning, as bells toll outside and I smell sweet incense in the air and hear clappers knocking in the distance, "and it’s very appealing. So you never have the feeling that it’s Sunday school. And you never have the feeling that you’re abandoning some cavalier life, or getting into some goody-goody enterprise. Not at all. Not at all." When a Buddhist magazine recently asked Cohen to conduct an interview with Sasaki, he gladly agreed, provided they could talk about "wine, women, and money." And to be sure, we’ve hardly been introduced before the disarming sinner-songwriter is using "pussy" and "shunyata" in the same sentence.

"What would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence. "I think that’s the real deep entertainment," he concludes. "Religion. Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available to us is within this activity. Nothing touches it." He smiles his godfatherly smile. "Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement."

Walking Through Adrienne Rich's Dharma Gate

"Prospective Immigrants Please Note"

by Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Enlightenment Therapy

Chip Brown of The New York Times has written a feature story on a Zen monk's encounter with psychoanalysis. The article is very compelling in its portrait of a wounded man seeking redemption.


Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26zen-t.html

As a practitioner, I have some disagreements with the portrayal of Zen in this piece. Zen comes off as a philosophy which is opposed to self-analysis. How strange. In Zen we rigorously study the self in order to forget the self. We do not forget the self as some kind of escape. That would be psychological repression which is in no way consonant with Buddhadharma.

On the other hand, I think that too much authority is granted by the author to the interpretive strategies of psychoanalysis. Chip Brown's writing seems a little seduced by Dr. Jeffrey Rubin's [the analyst] admittedly dazzling acumen. But Dr. Rubin's insights may not be necessarily so... The interpersonal subjectivity between analyst and patient can be of great help or it may muddy the true nature of things because people's opinions (read: ego) are competing for acceptance.

In the end, the clarifying factor is meditation. This (perhaps unfortunately) can only be done for oneself. After the therapy session's conclusion we must be our own therapists.

Nevertheless, the article can really raise awareness of how difficult the private lives of Zen practitioners may indeed be. Too often I project that the roshis I know are living free from suffering. It's a silly idea, really. They're perfectly human. But when you see them in the robes, comporting themselves with heartbracing dignity and stillness, the mind makes assumptions.

Awake people are awake, that is all.

So, much love and thanks go out to Chip Brown, Dr. Jeffrey Rubin and Prof. Louis Mitsunen Nordstrom for their intervention.

Some Thoughts On Ego Psychology And No-Self

I have a friend who is training to become a social worker. We're currently having a discussion about integrating spirituality and clinical work. I think of this as one of the last taboos, in a way. I guess there is much to say and none of it is all that helpful.

But I'll point at the moon.

On the one hand, there is clearly no conflict between mindfulness practice and cognitive restructuring techniques or stress reduction. Very few psychologists would object to integrating the techniques of basic meditation and awareness training.

I think the "problem" arises at a deeper level; namely, the ego. Contemporary Western clinical practices are dependent on the theoretical existence of this "thing" called the ego. The therapist approaches the client as a secular independent unit. The assumption is that the client's ego has basic reality testing, judgment, impulse control, defensive functions, and thought processes. Basically, the client has an identity. That identity is unique and irreducibly individual.

In many spiritual practices (certainly in Zen) one never has a true relationship with the ego because it's not really there! At the center of your being is nothing, an absence, a void. No self. This emptiness is infinite and transpersonal. Your potential--for happiness, among other things--is limitless because there is literally no duality between you and the universe. This is always and already so. Our task is to awaken to this.

Buddhism is uncompromising on this point. Any progress along the spiritual path ultimately has to deal with the question: "Who Am I?" If one meditates for long enough, invariably, everybody sees the same thing, basically: "I'm not there!" Ironically, when people "get it" they tend to become well adjusted and compassionate.

So integrating these two approaches to the self is a challenge as the therapist would have to reevaluate all their assumptions--starting with the idea that there are two independent people in a clinical setting. Maybe there aren't. What if the other person, quite literally, is you? This completely decenters the implied power relationship between therapist and client. In this way, there is only intimacy. What does this do to clinical etiquette and transference?

And then there's "ego identity." What to do with it? Strengthen it or collapse it? Acknowledge that it's a useful fiction when there's awareness? Or show how it's a delusion which stands in the client's way?

Obviously, the therapist can use a multi-modal approach which incorporates some techniques for mindfulness. But, in the end, if the jumping off point is still ego-based, I think it's difficult to work with the client beyond developing greater self-understanding and coping skills (which is no small thing!).

So an "egoless psychology" seems to be a final frontier of sorts. Many beautiful minds are exploring this now. Here are a few: Barry Magid, David Loy, Jack Kornfield, Ken Wilbur, Stanislav Grof, Daniel Goleman, and, of course, Thich Nhat Hahn.

Great Faith/Great Doubt and Nowhere to Stand

In mind training, koan-study is about contradiction, about cultivating a love for holding paradox. The little kensho pearls that get generated by the "bump-and-grind" of two opposing truth-like concepts are beautiful and helpful. But after some time, most everyone becomes a little malcontent with the wabi-sabi preciousness of koans. Like many things Japanese, there can be an over-valuing of the clever, the pretty, and the smug.

In general, students naturally and, I think, correctly want more. And here is where the great doubt of "nowhere to stand" usually gets introduced by the roshis.

I'll give an example. A few weeks ago, my teacher threw this curve at me:

Sensei said: "Is there a teaching no master ever taught before?"

I said something clever but sincere, like: "Yes, this morning I noticed that the zendo's bell needs to be fixed."

--OK, not bad. A little moment of counter-intuition contradiction. I was pleased for a second, then--

Sensei repeated: "Is there a teaching no master ever taught before?"

Me: "Um, I don't know?"

Sensei: "I'll give you a hint: there is doubt here."

Me: "What doubt?"

Sensei: "You should ask me if I, personally, believe my own question to be any good? Does my own koan help me or you at all? This is the practice."

-----------

I find what he is saying to be very compelling. He seemed to be pointing away from the origami-esque self-canceling of koans.

In fact, there are a number of people whom I’ve met who refuse to participate in koans. One such woman said to me: "Koans are like giving out pictures of bread to stop hunger."

Ultimately, this is all very moving to me. I feel like this woman and my teacher are really practicing “great doubt,” even if they lose some of the ground of their tradition.

After all, this is a practice of flexibility. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha is not shy about describing "swans that take flight towards heaven" in divine terms. And like a divine swan alighted, in flight we have nowhere to stand.

Doubting Morgan Freeman

In most religions, the need for faith is often bandied about. In Zen, not so much. Often, my teachers discuss the need for "great doubt." It is said: "At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully." 

This is a very honest but torturous route. Doubt reveals that faith can be helpful or it can give us Santa Clause. However, that species of doubt is just the surface. The Zen masters want us to go on a real mind bender; to the kind of dark forests where all our ideas live. If we are already dwelling inside this forest then we are asked to sit. We sit to to observe these phenomena with the great doubt of a scientist. 

But this requires engaged teachers, learned skill, and found community.
 
With these, doubting may reveal that there are ultimately no differences, only different moments. In the end, we have all had each other's experiences. And the experience of doubt is closely related to heartbreak and compassion, in the fissure of which I may understand your karma in a very personal way because my moments are contiguous with yours. I may share a border with your experience of doubting. In this way, humility. Simplicity. Intimacy.

Recently, I've been thinking about the choice of existence as described in The Shawshank Redemption. For many people, this film was a teaching. For example, there is the famous moment when Red, the narrator as played by Morgan Freeman, says: "Get busy living, or get busy dying." Obviously, he is recommending that we get busy living.

But perhaps this is wrong?

I think we can all say that we have gotten busy and lived. In fact, in these times, we have "lived" faster and more intensely than most. And each time, as it happens, after we have gotten busy, there is a fall. So perhaps it's time that we got busy living and dying. Or, rather, being aware that our life is living us and not the other way around...

All things rise and pass away. We do not know this through faith. We know this through direct experience. And so we need great doubt. We need the direct experience of greatly doubting the permanence of things, not great faith in mantras for living an idea of life. In this way we may move away from the seductive naivety of The Shawshank Redemption, with it's title implying that there is something which needs redemption in the first place.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." (-Rumi)

Kundalini Yoga: The Yoga of Awareness

Caution: the following is a little technical. Yoga is meant to be experienced, not explained. Jnana (intellectual understanding) may be one of the ways pointing towards enlightenment. But it is nothing without accompanying practice.

I was recently asked if Kundalini Yoga can remove samskaras. Samskaras are the mental formations we might call "personality traits" in the West. Some traits are undesirable, particularly habits of thought. Can Kundalini Yoga help to shed this kind of karma?

What I'm in the process of learning is that when exploring Kundalini Yoga (I'll shorten it to KY) by way of Jnana, there are two perspectives which need to be discussed: one point-of-view is that of Sikh Dharma, the other is more holistic.

KY's natural history runs through the Raja tradition of India, but today it is primarily interpreted by the Sikhs (in particular, Yogi Bhajan, who broke with tradition by teaching KY in America starting in the '60's).

The Sikhs have always had a kind of democratic impulse and they believe Kundalini raising technologies is everyone's birthright, not just the Raj. However, that means that a lot of KY theory has been sifted through the filter of Sikhism. In the process, its classical roots have been somewhat appropriated or transfigured on behalf of religious devotion (bakhti).

The second perspective that a lot of teachers embrace is more expansive than orthodox Sikhism. I can say with some confidence that KY practitioners keep coming back to the studio because the primary benefit is: awareness. I think if we see KY through the lens of "awareness training" then a lot of things start to make sense.

The huge emphasis in KY on meditation, breath, and rigorous movement catapult the mind (very quickly) into unordinary states. In order to do this, there are some pretty significant departures from classical yoga built into the current practice. This is especially true of the asanas. For example, a single KY asana may include and collapse up to three classical poses--it telescopes them by emphasizing movement and flow in (tri)angles. By classical standards, asana accuracy is sometimes sacrificed for efficacy.

This is especially true when it comes to KY's emphasis on the endocrine and nervous systems. In particular, KY hyper-stimulates the parasympathetic system while sending a lot of oxygen into the midbrain. Some believe that this triggers the Pineal Gland which may release elevated amounts of D.M.T. (sometimes called "the spirit molecule").

Whatever the internal mechanism, I can tell you that my mindfulness consistently goes way up during practice. Personally, I find that in contrast to other forms of yoga, the mind on KY looks at itself in a very reflective way. I have a friend who calls KY: Postmodern Yoga... because the mind becomes so aware of its own mechanisms.

So... to approach an answer to the question of samskara, I can discuss the Sikh explanation and also have a go at a more intuitive approach.

The Sikhs believe that there are specific times of the day when the self passes through a kind of twilight zone. During these periods, samskaras are most vulnerable to change. These times are called "Amrit Vela" (ambrosial hours)--they are between 4AM and 7AM and 4PM and 7PM. The Sikhs believe that it is then that our minds are in tune with "Ava Gavan" (a transient stage trending towards Nirvana) and if we do yoga with mantra recitation during this time, then "Guru" (the inner teacher, not an external teacher) will recognize the natural balance of the tattvas (aspects of reality) and correct the imbalances caused by samskaras. In this view, karma actually shapes the five tattvas: fire (anger), air (attachment), earth (greed), and ether (pride). Yoga, then, acts to balance karma/tattva by activating "Guru," the primal spiritual intelligence of every being.

Personally, I find this explanation dissatisfying because it requires faith in a cosmology. Though, it is worth saying that many, many cultures believe in an almost identical narrative. The 4AM to 7AM window is especially cherished in Tai Chi and Sufi practices.

But I'm much more enthusiastic about applying Buddhist philosophy here.

Virtually every Eastern discipline, stemming from a Vedic tradition, agrees that "volitional arisings" or "form-created-by-mind" is at the root of suffering and samskara. But there is significant disagreement about what causes the arising of these conditions. In Buddhism there is a total evacuation of metaphysics in favor of a psychological approach.

According to this view, in the beginning of everything there is avija or "ignorance" (not God, or the Word).

Here is a list (more of a feedback loop, really) of the 12 Nidanas. The Nidanas describe the contingent process of how we accumulate dukkha (suffering, stuck mind).


Ignorance
↓
Formations
↓
Consciousness
↓
Mind & Body
↓
Six Sense Bases
↓
Contact
↓
Feeling
↓
Craving
↓
Clinging
↓
Becoming
↓
Birth
↓
Old Age & Death


The Buddha believed that these contingent conditions arose because of ignorance of the relationship between form, consciousness, feeling, perception, and, finally, formation. This is how samskaras arise.

Kudalini Yoga has the ability to drive a wedge into the ignorance cycle.

The unique emphasis in KY on pranotthana or intensified and repeated movement of the six senses forces the mind to discern the difference between bodily pain (unavoidable) and mental suffering (optional). We realize that physical/mental formations do not need to cause changes in consciousness. The difference between "contact" and "feeling" is highlighted by the fact that we practice KY with our eyes closed. Lots of mantra and meditation are also utilized to enunciate this kind of awareness.

We also put emphasis on the body locks (bhandas) in KY. In fact, mulbhand (root lock), is applied pretty much throughout. Pranayam (breath) dynamics aside, the bhandas have the effect of putting clinging into your conscious control. Very quickly, then, one learns to skillfully uncling through this process. Impermanence becomes very literal.

Finally, breath control is the crown jewel of the practice. We practice something called "Breath of Fire" endlessly. This preps us for stopping the breath. This is said to cause mahanidra (the temporary death of the great nerve). Basically, this is as close to death as one can get. No breath. This is the most important stage in undoing samskaras. If we can master our striving and our clinging to our lives then wisdom may follow.

"Not Existence": The Zen of Ingmar Bergman