When Practicing Zazen

When I sit, I usually let thoughts just come and go the way they do, as someone said, "Like clouds in a clear blue sky." And as I've sat through this practice period, thoughts have gradually diminished to the point where almost an entire sit will take place thought-free. Hard to describe what that's like, but it happens. 

I don't sit generally more than 15-20 minutes at a time, though on occasion, I have sat longer. The shorter sits are for me the more positive, I guess. Practicing zazen is by its nature both ridiculous and useless. So we do it anyway, and sitting is itself the point, not any great gain or accomplishment. You just sit. 

A shorter sit is for me the more positive because like in the Old Days, I've been getting closer and closer to The Void (as I call it) when I sit, and I'm not going back there without a guide or teacher, and that hasn't happened yet in this practice period. 

But this morning's sit that I was late for made me think more about where I've been and where I'm going with this ridiculous and useless sitting. An image came to me early in my late sit. 

More like a movie clip, really. As I tend to do, I just let it come. At some point I figured it would go. Away.

Oh. 

I was walking toward Union Square on Geary, not far from my apartment between Leavenworth and Hyde. I got to the square and saw space on a bench facing I. Magnin and the City of Paris (tells you how long ago it was), and I sat down on the bench.

At the other end was a craggy old Chinese man in clean but somewhat tattered gray pants and jacket and we nodded and smiled at one another, and after a moment or two, I assumed the sitting zazen pose, and he saw and assumed it too, and we sat. He was my sangha for the moment, I was his.

For I don't know how long, we sat together-apart on the bench in Union Square facing I Magnin and the City of Paris while pigeons and people swirled around us, the cloudless bright blue sky overhead, and the sun somewhere shone into the Square. 

After a time, I don't know how long, I got up from my sit and bowed to the Chinese elder sitting in his gray tatters at the other end of the bench. He continued his sit, he didn't bow back. And I walked around the Square, counterclockwise, feeling strangely integrated with everything, everyone, even the pigeons all a part of me, I was a part of them, even the Square itself and all around it, out into the Bay and vastly beyond.

I walked around the Square to Powell, in front of the St. Francis and walked down Powell through the flower sellers and crowds and smelly trash in the street by the curb, down to Market and I thought of taking the cable car to North Beach Fisherman's Wharf but the line was so long and the day was so nice, I decided to keep walking down Market as far as Taylor then up Taylor through the Tenderloin to Geary and back to my apartment between Leavenworth and Hyde. 

As I got to the wrought iron gate of my apartment house, the clip stopped and started over.

It was in a loop and it was going to keep playing, over and over, and it wouldn't let go of me or I wouldn't let go of it, so I stopped the sit and went into the other room and had some coffee and sat for a few minutes before I started writing this. 

That was a memory, strangely complete and colorful and lively, of something that happened when I was living in San Francisco in 1976 or maybe a bit later. That day stayed with me for sometime, and then it faded and eventually was gone, and this morning there it was again.

In my mind and memory, not in "reality."

Buddhism teaches that we create reality in our minds, and that is the only reality most of us ever know. Buddhism teaches us ways to penetrate the mind's reality to reach what I'd call a "ground state." The truth behind the mind's reality. And I've been there. 

It happened in San Francisco, and in a sense it's never left me -- on the principle that once "there" you can't go back. But then the principle is also that you're always "there" -- you just don't know it.

And this movie-like clip that started playing during this morning's sit that I was late for was a kick from behind reminder. As so many things are these days.

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So I mentioned this episode from my morning sit to one of the Dharma teachers that afternoon, someone not quite of my age but close enough who knows San Francisco well enough and saw, in her own mind, some of what I saw, and after some consideration, she said, "You know, that story of what happened during your morning sit sounds more like a dream."

They say in this process you will encounter satori "sudden enlightenment" over and over and over again, and in the past I certainly did until it became almost routine, subliminal. Almost any encounter was an encounter with satori, to the point where I didn't notice it any more.

And then when she said, "You know, that story of what happened during your morning sit sounds more like a dream," it hit me, hard, that's exactly what it was. I was dreaming-awake. I was/am quite sure the incident and others like it actually happened, but at this great distance in time, it doesn't matter whether it had a physical "reality" or not. It was something I dreamed while awake, while sitting zazen that morning, and the instant of that realization, I could start to let it go. I haven't completely let go of it, obviously, because I'm still writing about it, but I don't relive it. 

We talked about many other things and she asked if I had practiced zazen since the morning sit, and I said I had, and it was fine. She just nodded, sagely. Then we shared stories about her brother and my sister, and we both might have choked up a bit. 

Later that evening another Dharma teacher Zoomed in from Illinois, not only an ordained Zen priest but an ordained and working Unitarian Universalist reverend, and she spoke movingly about many of the things I had spoken with the other Dharma teacher in the afternoon. Her topic was ostensibly "Meditation."

I'll leave it at that.