The man called Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, grew up in a highly artificial world, a completely staged world.   His encounter with the unstaged world, with its “inescapable indignities” (disease, old age, death), was so disturbing that he could not remain at home; so he left behind his family and wealth.   The Prodigal Son, on the other hand, left home in rebellion and did not encounter the unstaged world until all his father’s money was gone.   Here are two quite different ‘takes’ on leaving home but each entails being alone and in spiritual jeopardy.

The legend of the Buddha and the parable of the prodigal son are comparable templates for our own, individual encounters with the unstaged world.   Meditation, though tightly scripted, nevertheless presents us with our primordial mind.   Each time we take the meditation posture we let all the staging of consciousness go; our opinions, judgements and attitudes, just float away.  The meditator untethers herself from security, authority, familiarity and predictability; a very small scale but completely genuine leaving of home.   Meditation is rather like a virtual home leaving that can be rehearsed each day.

Few ordinary people replicate their religion’s home-leaving paradigm.   But Jews who meditate can hope to better penetrate the meaning of Abraham’s story;  Christians might appreciate better the 40 days that Jesus spent in the desert;  and Moslems might draw inspiration from the legends of Mohammad’s exile from Medina.   Buddhists, who are heir to a sophisticated meditation culture, will learn to assemble their lives as “grounded in practical kindness, in the ethics of non-harming, flexibility, and listening, and in the thoughtful consideration of what will really work in this world as it is, not as it should be, to benefit others.”  Similarly Baha’is, Christian Scientists and yes, even Atheists, would each find spiritual value from leaving home in this way.

There is a Zen saying, “arrival hinders arrival”.  This is another way of saying what the manifold spiritual paradigms of the home leaver teach us: leaving facilitates arrival.  This is the intrinsic irony, the “impossible predicament” which life presents to us all.   The path to the heart of one’s spiritual being portends an unparalleled completeness which itself interferes with our path.  The Christian mystic Simone Weil spoke of this predicament: “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence,…nothing which exists is absolutely worthy of love.   We must therefore love that which does not exist.”

Zen meditation, on behalf of all beings, creates the form of absence.

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Typically,  a Zen monk’s sojourn in a monastery is a temporary thing. Historically, the vast majority of Zen monks leave their monastic community and lifestyle and return to lay life. Most simply return to regular livelihoods such as farming or manufacturing but some find a special place within the spiritual life of their communities as a teacher; and those who value the role make donations to sustain a teacher.  These donations are generally anonymous, completely voluntary and intended as a direct expression of gratitude.  Zen monks are not entitled to charity.  Monks who have little to offer of an intrinsic and widely acknowledged  value will not receive any donations because there’s no special value; at least in theory.  I know ssomething called dāna is often routinized and practiced automatically, but in my opinion any formalized remuneration, such as  titheing, ought not to be called dāna.  I’m not saying it’s wrong, I just say it’s not that subtle religious idea; Buddhist dāna.  True, everyone’s free to take it or leave it, but that is not a spacious enough sentiment to contain the depth of the spiritual friend relationship.  Plus, it leaves out anyone who wants to hear the Dharma but cannot afford the price.

As a Zen monk living in the world I want very much to teach meditation in a way that ordinary, intelligent people are able to see a real value for themselves in their real, everyday life.  I believe that people will recognize that value and reflect it by giving what their means allow toward retaining that value.  Alternatively, the teacher will become unavailable through the need to work a regular job.  My coaches in the business world disagree with me on this, by the way.  They consider me hopelessly naive.  They say that people will just take the value and pay nothing even if they can afford it and even if they would cheerfully pay other counselors’ large fees.  My experience so far proves this common but cynical analysis to be only sometimes true.  This is encouraging, and one cannot help but wonder how professional relationships with lawyers and accountants would be affected if consumer-determined value became the ethical norm.

Life is complex and calls for us to play many roles. In public, for example, we are very likely to think and behave one way at our three year old’s birthday party and quite differently when at our work. Our skill at compartmentalizing our life is an important ally, we feel; not the least for the psychological benefits that accrue from not mixing work and family. But for some people, their private Self becomes quite distinct from their public Self. The stress of dealing with this distinction can be the root source of quite a lot of life’s trouble. Our public Self might know how to project equanimity, confidence, competence, determination and strength of character. Private Self invests a far more emotional element into our true judgements and opinions. Successfully compartmentalizing the various “selves” which comprise our life is, indeed, a key life skill.

Public and private Selves always have some sort of relationship. They can be very close to identical or they can be drastically different, even estranged. When private Self and public Self are different, asymmetries of all sorts are able to creep into our general life. One fairly common example of what I am talking about concerns those who feel as fragile as a wounded bird in their heart of hearts and yet each day the public Self continues to work, shop and raise children. At some point, and more often than we think, such a disparity in views can end up being problematic because it takes so much energy to suppress the doubts that flow from our private Selves that we may become vulnerable to adventitious and disruptive impulses such as anger, greed or despair.

Meditation cultivates integration. When we are able to be pretty much the same person whether alone or in public, then no problems arise. But where, in response to fear and doubt, we skew our lifestyle and our spirituality heavily toward the public Self, we sometimes suppress the private Self. Modern, increasingly urban, life demands this of us more and more. In many ways our cultural present demands that we be ambivalent within ourselves; which is to say we often end up cultivating a comparative and even adversarial relationship between the two Selves.

If you are someone who struggles to maintain a public face, this is where meditation can really help. The relationship between private and public Selves can serve as a template for all other relationships in life. In all relationships, the ideal foundational condition is that of symmetry and/or equivalence. (Equivalence, please note, is not the same as equality). Just like in a marriage or a friendship, perfect equivalence makes any relationship effortless, pleasant and wholesome. From the meditators’ point of view, marital happiness, satisfying friendship or personal integrity all equally flow from restoration of symmetry. The restoration of symmetry between the private Self and the public Self is the basic work of meditation as a personal practice. As this restorative process develops, life loses much of its essentially self-generated stresses. In Zen meditation, symmetry is restored by composing thought and form as close to ‘zero’ as possible. With the restoration of equivalence between private and public personas as a basis, all other relationships also reorient, as necessary, toward symmetry and equivalence.

When private Self and public Self are equivalent, that is the “one who is not busy”.

The talk is almost 55 minutes long; it’s not one of my better ones, but there are some good questions and our sense of something valuable coming to an end might be perceivable.  As usual the sound is not great but I hope passable.

The first photo is our general set up in the chapel at Queenswood.  The next one over is what I call the skandha-labra, an iron-wire sculpture with 5 candles which symbolizes the 5 skandhas of the Self.   Next over shows the kinhin (walking meditation) line as it leaves the chapel.  Traditionally we do our walking meditation outside.

This photo is me, sitting on the platform made by one of the regular meditators.

The last photo is our doan hitting the han (also crafted by the same person who created the platform), a call to come to meditation.

In Zen we often talk about the habits of body, speech and mind.  We have multitudes of mind/body habits; at least as many as there are birds in the sky.  Each habit is really a relatively stable ‘cloud’ of more basic reflexes.  Jealousy, for example, is a habitual response to a cluster of other, interacting, primal factors such as fear, need, refuge, ill will, delight etcetera.  This brings to mind my friend’s ‘accumulation zone’ for bird carcasses.  The interplay of causes and conditions will always involve certain causal clusters and each dysfunctional habit of mind and body is like a beach with many dead birds.  Ancient fear is a dead bird.  Ancient hatred is a dead bird.  Even joy and delight can be a dead bird.

The wise walk mindfully the beaches of their jealousy, their antipathy or their deep craving and, like my friend does on behalf of the government, identify the birds and describe the carcass.

Here’s a common and practical example; relationships often resemble a beach strewn with the avian choir invisible.  Some of those spiritual dead birds are  large and compelling presences, others not so much.  But past a certain point the beach becomes unpleasant.  In any life, major traumatic events or familial abuse can literally perfume every aspect of relationship, very often in ways that block happiness and cause harm.

All stressful situations would improve if we were more accustomed to walking the beaches of our relationships.  We would find some beaches almost pristine and others quite littered, not only with dead birds but also all the other detritus from the sea.  We would carefully note and examine each washed up artifact, starting with the dead birds and later cataloging the driftwood and the beach glass.  Finally, one would become quite familiar with the types of flotsam (habits of mind and body) that accumulate.  Armed with this deep knowledge one could then begin to mitigate harm and maybe even enjoy the wonder of the land / sea interface.

Our original host, Queenswood Centre, has now closed its doors for good and left us bereft of a venue, temporarily.  We did find another place to meditate in the Victoria West Community Centre, though.  Our new space is very different in neighbourhood feel, in soundscape and in standard of living of residents.  Where QW is situated in an established, rather affluent area of the city, the VWCC is in an old, rather more funky part of the city with many transient people.  It makes for more distractions in our meditation sessions, I think; but also it offers a challenge to our concentration that our group has matured enough to be able to handle.  Queenswood was the perfect place to found and develop a meditation group but taking the meditation into the ‘real’ world requires a more robust deployment of meditation skills.  With a soundscape full of children playing, people talking and arguing, busses going by and young men playing basketball this new venue will help us develop this aspect.  We are not especially religious, but even so I admire and venerate the Bodhisattva Vow, which venerates all Being not just the quiet, refined and polite ones.  I knew a Geshe once who often hung out downtown with the rif-raf because this is where the suffering was greatest.  Being forced from our womb-like, beautiful home has put us closer to the suffering of real life and is going to be good for our practice.

Even though I strive to teach meditation and think it has the power to save us all, I confess to not enjoying long sittings.  I am looking forward to seeing Norman again though, and several of the students who sit with me will be there, and that will be nice.  But I have not left the island for many years and it’s a long trip just to endure a few days of discomfort.

Here’s a talk I gave at our May meditation retreat.  It’s rather long and I do not recall what I was on about, but maybe someone will enjoy it:

Anyhow I plan to post more frequently for the next little while.  Below please find the talk I gave on the evening before our first full day.  I gave a lecture each day and each lecture includes questions from the participants.  Sometimes the questions are difficult to hear, our recording equipment being rather primitive, but my hope is that the question will be discernible from the response.  This introductory talk is about 37 and a half minutes in length. 

Our little sesshin was very well received by everybody who could attend.  All the reports have been positive in that people felt they had investigated their Selves very deeply and had both learned and restored things about themselves.

Let me add another talk to this blogpost.  Following is a QW Sunday talk from January 2010.  This is a much shorter recording, using once again that rhetoric around the meticulous/scrupulous dyadic narrative.

Here’s a couple of longish talks from the QW meditation sessions.  The first one is just shy of 26 minutes long; it is yet another zazen instruction but begins with a discussion of Karma.

This talk, from June 14, 2010, attempts to expand on the meaning of the initial stage of Buddhist practice, called ‘leaving home’.  It is 32 minutes and 16 seconds in length. 

As meditators we wish that our relationships become more wholesome and that our behaviour in general result in fewer painful or harmful consequences.  The best predictor of a wholesome evolution of self and relationship is to cultivate innocence in our meditation.  Innocence means to not harbour any harmful intent.  It’s not about the dewey eyed naivete which is the usual caricature; it’s not even about feeling good will toward all being.  It’s just the mind and the awareness that does not exclude, an openness which crowds out exclusive qualities such as ill will.  Finding that awareness that lets the fruit be the fruit and embraces the present in ways that do not nourish ill will, resentment, anger or any of the toxic qualities of mind, means that mind and body have receded temporarily.  A weakened comparative awareness results in a moment of peace.  Back and forth, mind and body advance, mind and body recede.  Each is an initial condition, now engaged with the karmic world.  We don’t know what (if anything) will come to fruition as a consequence of a moment of noncomparative awareness but Chaos Theory predicts  that innocence at the beginning will help things evolve in a good way, a better way; the middle way.   When mind and body advance innocence is assailed by ancestral axioms but less vigorously as time goes by.

It makes me think of Lin Chi’s “True Man of No Rank” which he says is moving “in and out of your face”; we see this sort of reciprocal observation often in  meditation.

Here’s some more podcasts.  I don’t really remember them well and if they’ve been posted before, my apologies.  The first one is about 13 minutes and touches on some of the themes I wrote on above.

This one is just over 14 minutes.  It’s yet another take on Lin Chi’s utterance:

This one is about 13 min 30 seconds.  It’s kin hin instruction from August 2009.