Find­ing Presence

If you’re fol­low­ing along with my “stuff,” you’ll know I have sev­eral books on the go, each vying for the ‘supremacy’ of which will get done, and there­fore pub­lished, next. I’ve got­ten to the point of a fairly reg­u­lar writ­ing sched­ule, and this story popped out today, (it’s included in my Zen sto­ries book, ten­ta­tively titled, “Half Asleep in the Bud­dha Hall”.)

In the Moment

A Zen monk, walk­ing along, was chased by a tiger. He ran, and came to the edge of a cliff. He jumped, catch­ing hold of a root stick­ing out from the cliff face. He looked up, and saw the tiger, lick­ing his lips.
He looked down, and saw another tiger, lick­ing his lips.
The root started to pull lose.
He looked at the cliff wall. There, in a small hol­low, was a straw­berry plant, with one per­fect straw­berry. He picked it, and ate it.
How deli­cious!

Sim­ple pres­ence requires that we be… well… sim­ply present. Not an easy thing, when con­fronted with a myr­iad of dis­trac­tions. Or per­haps bet­ter put: when we end­lessly obsess about the myr­iad of things we dis­tract our­selves with.

In Zen, the essence of the teach­ing is Zazen, or “just sit­ting.” It is not quite just sitting-it is find­ing the spa­cious­ness that exists when one does not fol­low a thought.

Our nor­mal wak­ing time is a men­tal game of ‘one damn thing after another.’ We think and plot and plan and name and offend our­selves. This game is played between our ears, in the great churn­ing caul­dron of our minds. As we dis­cussed above, the thoughts them­selves are not the cul­prits. The cul­prit is our cling­ing to the mean­ing­ful­ness of our thoughts, processes, games and our selves.

So, Zen seeks to use ’just sit­ting’ as a way to observe our thoughts with­out attach­ing to them. Thoughts become as clouds against a blue sky-ever mov­ing, ever chang­ing, ever deplet­ing, reform­ing, and drift­ing. Clouds become leaden only when we focus on one and try to make it real.

Even­tu­ally, just sit­ting leads to an essen­tial quiet­ness and below the quiet­ness lays a pool of empti­ness. Our ego struc­tures, ever invested in cre­at­ing mean­ing and espe­cially impor­tance for our ‘ego-self,’ hates it that what lays beneath is empti­ness. Form­less­ness. Ego­less­ness. That which is, and is not.

We scare our­selves with the emptiness-with the sense of self, falling away. The exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­phers declared that our fear (our angst) was of death, or non-being. This is not the mes­sage of Zen.

I have come to see that empti­ness is an empti­ness of assump­tions. Def­i­n­i­tions. Mean­ings. When we see our selves as con­struc­tions, stories-in a sense, the lies we tell our­selves of a his­tory that never hap­pened, there is, para­dox­i­cally, free­dom. The free­dom is from the sto­ries we tell ourselves.

Beneath the sense of self, beneath the sto­ries we tell our­selves, is a vast pool of empti­ness, in which all things ‘sim­ply are.’ Now, if you are into Quan­tum Physics, or into cos­mol­ogy, you will know that sci­en­tists see that every­thing is the same thing. Every­thing we are is the same thing every­thing is, and it all came from ‘source.’ I am you, you are me, and we are all the same as every­thing else.

And within the sys­tem are vast are­nas of emptiness-spaces between what is, bal­anc­ing it with “what isn’t.” This is cap­tured in the sym­bol of the yin/yang, which graph­i­cally demon­strates that there is ‘is’ in ‘is not’, and vice versa.

As the amaz­ing Sufi poet, Rumi, put it,

Mir­ror

We are the mir­ror as well as the face in it.
We are tast­ing the taste this minute of eter­nity.
We are pain and what cures pain.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
(Barks, Green, and Jalåal Al-Dåin Råumåi 111)

This is a lot to get your head around, but essen­tial to see and feel. As we let go of attach­ing so tightly to our invented ego-selves, we begin to develop a sense of humour. We see how often we make messes for our­selves, and the basis of the mess is our cling­ing to our ver­sion of things.

Instead, there is a place where all that is hap­pen­ing, all that ‘I am,’ is found in this moment. It is the monk, the tigers, and the straw­berry. Rather than engag­ing in a men­tal drama of rel­a­tive importance-making, the monk sees, appre­ci­ates and eats the straw­berry. The tigers are still there, and the root is still let­ting go. Nei­ther thing is under the monk’s con­trol (nor is the exis­tence of the straw­berry…) The monk has two choices, really. He can make up sto­ries about his dire cir­cum­stance, or he can mind­fully eat the strawberry.

Notice that the story leaves our monk hang­ing. We do not know how it all comes out, and that is hardly the point. This is also the con­di­tion of our lives. No mat­ter how much time we spend describ­ing how we think it will all come out, what actu­ally hap­pens is what hap­pens. This is best cap­tured in John Lennon’s line, “Life is what hap­pens while you are busy mak­ing other plans.”

Our focus needs to simul­ta­ne­ously soften and sharpen. Soften-by tak­ing our­selves with humour and non-seriousness. Sharpen-as we coura­geously look at the empti­ness that lies beneath the sur­face of the sto­ries we tell ourselves.

In this spa­cious place, we see the impor­tance and the fleet­ing­ness of this moment.

This, alone, is enough.