Quote to follow. Blogging at work is a tremendous pain in my butt, but I certainly am not going to quit now!
The farther you enter into the truth, the deeper it is. - Bankei in the Zen Calendar (June 10, 2004).
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; yet nothing troubles me less. - Charles Lamb in the Zen Calendar (May 13, 2003).
Day 358. Eight remaining blogs . . . AND a Peak Experience! I glanced at the followers number when I opened the blog just now (wow - additional evidence that my Ego is as robust as my Monkeys -- it crops up everywhere!) and Voila! Twenty-five followers rather than 24! I have consciously tried to comment less on my obsessive neurosis about the number 6, but don't think for a moment that my weirdness on this issus had dissipated. The fact that the number 24 adds up to 6 has disconcerted me far more than I will quantify on this public forum. Suffice it to say, I am ecstatic to discover there are now 25 followers. The number 25 adds up to a blissful, serene 7. Whew! That was close - 25 followers with only a week left to blog. My OCD feels salved like A&D ointment on a saddle sore.
Gifts from zazen have been wafting up from my cushion like a cloud of green smoke enveloping Led Zeppelin fans. This comes as a great relief, because the din of cerebral activity roaring through my skull last week rivaled the aftermath of last night's State of the Union address (okay, Doc, enough with the simile!) My point is that the initial bout of anxiety and apprehension and grandiosity regarding my final blogs has been replaced with a state representing what the whole year was supposed to be about in the first place. I am at peace. Calm. Not attached to a particular outcome or level of performance. Sitting at the juncture of Emptiness and Non-Dualism. If I write a magnum opus -- Cool. If I write crap -- Cool. The year was about sitting every day and writing about it every day. Done (almost). Noting the emerging byproducts of meditating every day is simply a bonus.
One of the byproducts is this miraculous realization that something has actually occurred over the past year. All this butt-on-the-cushion time has meaning. And the beautiful thing is that I would also be fine if I were typing, at this exact moment, that it had no meaning whatsoever. That is what I have learned. It is what I now know. I never could have predicted that, as I approached my final blogs, I would have the feelings and thoughts that I am presently attempting to describe. It feels a bit like our uncanny . . . bummer! I was interrupted at work, and now I am really curious to know where that sentence was leading. Alas! The remainder appears to have escaped me . . .
The feelings and thoughts I was attempting to describe center around the notion that I am unalterably changed through a steady zazen practice and, simultaneously, I am perpetually myself. Such is Zen. Strangely, I feel extraordinarily prepared to wrap up the blog endeavor and focus my writing energy on another project. Though fear and trepidation are, at the moment, nonexistent, I know they will ebb and flow and, frankly, I don't care. Sitting every day has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt (and the clap of one hand) that I can take action regardless of the transient thoughts and feelings that waft across the sky of my mind. Feeling anxious, exhausted, bored, distracted, or sick is NOT synonymous with avoiding a sitting session. My butt can plunk down on the cushion regardless of the seemingly substantive counter notions and Monkey persuasion that raucously detonate my brain cells. I can separate the essential from the nonessential. I can distinguish illusion from Reality.
Some zazen sessions shimmer so brilliantly I half expect to look over and see a fat, smiling, peaceful guy sitting on a zafu next to me. It is like all my Instruments of Emptiness actually succeed in creating a vacuous space where my mind used to be. Every once in a great while, I am able to enter "Just This," and the Monkeys actually refrain from shouting, "Just This!" so the emptiness and nothingness are actually silent, too. For a few seconds, I transcend myself and disappear into bliss, ecstasy, and oblivion.
Last night, I stepped outside the chatter and inside the Palace of Origin for a few seconds. Simultaneously, I had the strangest sensation of levitating off my cushion about a foot, and simply hovering, in a sensationless but perfect half-lotus, above my cushion. Mind fell away, but apparently body just lifted off the floor a bit. I guess all that Empty and Nothing rendered me weightless, and I floated right up. Earlier in the year, this would have been an astonishing, stupendous event - due cause for ego centered celebration and an extra long blog. Instead, I just kept breathing. Focused on where the breath entered and exited my nostrils. Consciousness didn't rush in like the Calvary, rescuing me from the unfamiliar strangeness of it all.
It amazes and puzzles me that I create such persistent barriers to executing my life from this place of pristine and remarkable clarity. Enter zazen practice. The beautiful thing about it is its unceasing necessity. At least, if I am to have the remotest chance of living Life the way it wants to be lived. Instead of job security, I guess I have Sitting Security. Because I plan to stick with it for a long, long, time.
Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc
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