excerpt from: Raptures

Prologue


Kensho Retreat Center
Santa Cruz Mountains, California — Sunday
 
Kensho is beautiful this spring. The brooks and streams are swollen with clear rushing water, and the hillside grasses, destined to be parched yellow within weeks, are lushly, ethereally green. Wildflowers dot the trails and fields with pinpoints of brilliant color. During the day the temperature is hot but not baking, and the air is scented with bay, sage and jasmine. Although the mosquitoes are starting to hatch they’re still too small to be much trouble. Claire and I are totally overjoyed to be on retreat. Last week we were married in a simple Buddhist ceremony performed by Jack Zorn before some 50 of our closest friends and relatives. We made our vows within a circle of flower petals, at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, surf crashing on the rocks, with bridesmaids in white wearing crowns of gardenias and looking like pagan queens, and my parents standing side by side for the first time in 20 years. So now, excited newlyweds on the verge of a four-week honeymoon to Italy, we’ve decided to come to Kensho to spend a week sleeping apart and meditating for 10 hours a day — a week facing stiff muscles and joints and sore knees to clear our minds of the stress surrounding the wedding, to relax into presence, and to start our life’s journey together on the right track.

It occurs to me that I’ve been writing in this journal for more than a year now without having given an adequate description of meditation. Okay, here’s the thing about it: basically, you do nothing. You just sit there with your eyes closed, trying to be aware of the breath as it comes and goes. There’s nothing to fix or figure out or control. You just breathe and notice your breathing. And when you feel properly absorbed in the process of the breath, you can allow your awareness to open out to include whatever is strongest in your experience — a sensation in the body, an emotion, a racing train of thought, being aware at the same time of whether your mind is interpreting the experience as pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, not judging yourself for whatever you experience, not holding on to any experience and not pushing anything away, allowing everything to blossom in its own time, pain and pleasure, fear and joy, allowing yourself to become absorbed in the flux of the moment, the nowness of things. Along the way, of course, you become assaulted by the ugly ruts of your mind: fantasies of having sex with gorgeous women, or being cruel to an enemy, or planning your next vacation right down to the tropical rum drink you sip out of a pineapple while you sit on a soft beach at sunset — assaulted by all the judgments and narcissisms, the fears and bigotries that have created the weave of your life, the quirky and unavoidable stitches of the mind that form your karma. And so while you sit there doing nothing (your knees on fire or your leg snoozing like a hunk of lead pipe), you’re actually doing everything. You’re living your entire life up close and personal. You’re creating a space between your habits and your ability to act on them. Slowly but surely, you begin to free yourself of the need for pleasure and the fear of pain.

So far, the first couple of days of practice have been routine for me. In the mornings we rise at six, sit in the Zendo for 40 minutes, walk for 30, and sit for another 40. After breakfast, there’s more sitting and walking until lunch. During the afternoon there’s time for yoga or qi gong or hiking on the trails. After a hike to the ridge some of us cool ourselves off with a nice dip in the pond hidden behind a stand of trees off one of the trails. The pond at Kensho is always a high point for me. We paddle through the icy currents, laughing Buddhists, our skin stinging with cold and our minds awake, as the turtles bob their reptilian heads in the water and the neon blue dragonflies flit across the surface like tiny toy helicopters. At the far end of the pond a lone blue heron stands proudly among the reeds, waiting for the silver flash of a carp’s tail. In the evenings we have our silent dinner at a long table in the common room, and it’s given me joy, a thrill, really, to know that Claire, my precious new wife, is sitting just a few feet away. Now and then we encounter each other in one of the buildings or on one of the paths connecting them, stopping to bow politely, a mischievous smile rippling across our faces, then pass each other without even touching. After dinner Jack Zorn or one of the other teachers gives a dharma talk, usually a splendid one, followed by student questions, and then we all go to bed and start it over again in the morning. Men and women sleep in separate dorms, or in tents on the grounds between the buildings. Claire is in the women’s dorm, but I, wary of snoring men, brought my North Face tent and set it up in a shady glade between the common building and the Zendo.

During these first few days my meditation practice has followed a standard trajectory: in the morning my incessantly distracted mind becomes flooded with thoughts and images until, as I focus and refocus on the breath, it manages to collect itself into a one-pointed field of awareness, a process I always visualize as being like defragging a hard drive on a computer. By mid-morning, my mind gathered, calm and radiant, I often attain the first Dhyana, a preliminary state of absorption free of gross thoughts and mental defilements. But after the lunch break I typically become afflicted by the hindrance of torpor, my mind unraveling across a vague dreamscape until I catch myself nodding off on the cushions, jolted awake by the fear of falling over. By the evening meditations I start to get focused again, and if I choose to sit on after the dharma talk I often attain my deepest concentration of the day —sitting on my bench in the dark zendo, candles guttering softly on the shrine, my physical body seems to dissolve as the breath flows sweet as honey, my hands, legs, torso, and face all eventually disappear, until finally even the breath vanishes, with nothing remaining but awareness itself, and a stillness that’s explosive. It’s great to be on retreat.

Monday
During the first sit this morning, my mental defragging was amazingly brief. Within moments I became highly absorbed, my breath razor thin. Soon parts of my body began to melt away, thoughts didn’t come at all, and the stillness became laced with pure presence. I’m not sure how long I stayed like this, a few minutes probably, before I noticed a sensation racing around the edges of my body, a rawness that I soon identified as fear. I sat with the fear for a few minutes, noting it as fear, fear, fear, as we are instructed to do. But the sensation of unease gradually increased and, suddenly taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes and squeezed my hands into fists, instantly aware of my body again. The stillness, so conducive to calm just moments before, now seemed to be a portal through which fear traveled to me. The fear surrounded me like an invisible abyss filled with teeth that could swallow me at any minute, from any direction. To fight it, I looked around the zendo at my fellow meditators. Sitting on their cushions or benches, backs straight, some faces soft, some faces twisted into frozen grimaces, some bloated with sleep. I saw Claire one row behind me and three mats to the left, her posture perfect, her face tanned and clean, black ponytail hanging down her back. I could hear the burble of the engorged stream down the hill, the birds singing in the trees, a meditator coughing, shifting in his seat. Everything was as it should be. We were all just trying to do our best to become more aware, trying to become better people, and we would all be okay in the end, wouldn’t we? All at once, the fear seemed to leave me. I no longer felt that ravenous void surrounding me, and with a little wiggle of my torso I closed my eyes and resumed my practice.

Almost immediately I began to see the shapes. Somewhere in the light behind my closed eyelids, patches of shadow began to shift, images started to form. Tall, dark, moving shadows, they seemed to become larger as I gazed at them. As the seconds passed these shapes gradually became defined as walking figures dressed in black. There were several of them, tall figures staggering slowly toward me, tentatively, as if they were sleepwalking ghosts emerging from a dark alley. An icy sensation ran up the nape of my neck, and I opened my eyes for a moment, hoping to break the link these images formed with my mind: people sitting on their cushions, a blue jay alighting on a branch, sandalwood smoke curling up to the rafters, a pinch of tightness in my hips. But when I closed my eyes again the figures were still there — only now they were closer to me. And now their faces had become visible, if not quite identifiable: vague, blurry, strangely shaped. Faces that were in a state of motion.
Then one of the figures reached out a blurry hand and squeezed my shoulder.

I opened my eyes, jerking backward with a gasp and, my bench collapsing, I tumbled over.

Later. . .
The smell of mint tea drifted under my nose as a gust of wind blew leaves across the boards of the verandah and the bay tree tipped and shimmered. The room was small and rustic and smelled of burnt wood. They call it the dokusan, or teacher’s room. There was a cast-iron stove in one corner, a neat pile of firewood next to it. A little pine bookcase stood against a wall. It was filled with volumes of Buddhist sutras, collections of Ryokan and Dogen, and Bhikhu Nanamoli’s Life of the Buddha. An old dusty futon was spread out on the floor, and a spider rappelled from its ceiling web. I was sitting on a black zafu opposite Jack, who sat with a frayed wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders, holding a mug of steaming tea in his hands. It was around ten in the morning.

“We get all sorts of visual imagery when we sit, Joel,” Jack was reassuring me. “I wouldn’t let it worry you.”
“But it does worry me,” I told him. “It was scary. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.”

Jack lifted the mug to his lips, blew, and took a careful sip. He lowered the mug and looked at me. “The question is really one of identification. If you identify with these figures, or with the fear they induce in you, then in a sense you become the fear. You see what I mean?”
I had to think about that one. Luckily, the sensation of a heavy hand gripping my shoulder faded as soon as I’d opened my eyes in the zendo that morning. My embarrassment at having fallen off my meditation bench, however, wasn't as easy to erase, and rather than continue sitting, I simply uprighted my bench, stood, ignored the curious eyes of those who watched me, bowed to the Buddha on the shrine, and quickly exited the zendo. Lucky for me, I had scheduled this meditation interview with Jack the day before, and now he was just the person I needed to see.

“I understand what you’re saying, conceptually at least,” I told him. “But how do I stop identifying with my fear when fear is such a visceral emotion?”
“Just stay with the body. Notice where you’re feeling the fear. You can note it as fear, fear.”
“But I tried that and it didn’t work.”
“Then go back to focusing on the breath. Just remember: no matter how much fear you are feeling, it isn’t really who you are. Fear arises, Joel. This is a precondition of being a human being. Fear arises just like desire, hatred, and sadness arise. Just like physical pain arises. Whatever arises is conditioned. And whatever is conditioned will change. So don’t worry. Be open to your fear with kind attention, and it will dissolve.”

Afternoon —
I arrived late for the 11 o’clock meditation. Most people were already seated, eyes closed. I walked over to my bench, squatted down, then slid my legs beneath it. I tied my blanket around my waist, and set my hands palm up on my lap in a meditation mudra. I shut my eyes, saw vague patches of shadow and light, took a few deep breaths to settle in. I was determined to have a solid session of practice, no matter what. Rather than focusing on passing sensations as they arise, the classic Vipassana technique, I decided to focus solely on my breath, using the sensations of breathing to steady my mind and prevent any strange visual manifestations from arising. But as soon as I closed my eyes, my plans were thwarted. I discovered my mind to be so calm and concentrated that my breath was too soft to follow. I waited a few minutes for the usual parade of self-important images and thoughts to arise, but they never did. And my breath was still too subtle to use as an object of focus. So I just sat with bare awareness as birds chirped, jets roared high in the sky, and meditators coughed, sneezed, and shifted in their seats. Within minutes I had lost the felt sense of being in a body, and there were times when I seemed to be floating above the floor, or else expanded outward, boundaryless and oceanic. Flashes of fear arose in my mind like bolts of lightning illuminating a dark sky— I observed the fear, noticing a sudden surge in my heartbeat, breathing into it, then felt the fear release, the heart gradually slowing. Yes, it was working just as Jack Zorn said it would. Stop identifying with my fear, and fear merely arises and passes away. It’s nothing personal. It’s just a passing phenomenon.

I’m not exactly sure at what point the transition came. The point where the dull chiaroscuro behind my eyes became structured with tall dark shapes shambling in my direction. They just seemed to appear all at once, large cloaked figures standing above me, reaching out to me with long, weirdly-shaped arms. Rather than open my eyes to expunge the images from my mind, I decided to just let them happen. To become an active observer of my mind’s phenomena. Like a good Buddhist, I was investigating my mind. I was trying to see what these images were made of. If I investigated them deeply enough, I knew that they would reveal themselves to be empty, impermanent, without self. And my fear would dissolve.

But then I felt arms sliding on me, oddly-shaped hands gripping me. I felt myself being lifted from my bench and firmly guided forward. Before I could even think about resisting, I found that I had been hustled inside another room, a small bare room lit by an eerie yellow light. I was surrounded by the tall dark forms and an odd smell like rotten eggs. Compared to the imposing height of these shapes, I was like a child. I noticed a small wood table in the center of the room. Resting on it was a little polished red box. Strange gold symbols were painted on the sides of the box. The object seemed ominously familiar, but I didn’t know why. Then one of the tall shapes moved to one side to reveal something stranger: a black figure was shaking violently in a high wooden chair. It bolted and thrashed about in a blur of movement. Something flashed below me: bright wiggling shapes moving in my direction. They were like tubes filled with white neon, or phosphorescent worms.

Then I noticed an intense burning sensation beneath my navel, like small hot blades digging into me. I tried to scream, but my vocal chords didn’t seem to be working. I tried to run, but I was pinned in place.

Then the scene suddenly changed. I was lying on a hard cool surface like a slab of stone, the smell of rotten eggs in my nostrils. Dark figures loomed all around me. I saw their shapeless hands moving over me, like methodical surgeons performing some special operation. I heard a series of precise clicking and snapping sounds, as they fitted something into place. There was a quality of fiendish routine to their movements that implied, horribly, that I had been the subject of this procedure many times before. My belly still burned, only now the sensation was sharper. I managed to lift my head and looked: a cluster of gold needles stuck out from my flesh. Shadowy hands plucked these needles out of me, then inserted new ones back in. Somehow I had the understanding that I was being “refitted.” I glanced to my left: the lid of the polished red box on the table was now open, and resting inside the box, on a bed of crimson velvet, were dozens of the short thick gold needles in neat shiny rows. . . .

What are you doing? I shouted, but the words in my mouth came out like the sound of rustling leaves, a crispy susurrus of nonsense. My head sank back. I gazed up at the dark figures, tried discerning the intent in their smeared, shifting faces, but couldn’t. When one of them moved I noticed that the wall on my right had disappeared. In its place I saw the façade of a church that seemed to float on water. Strange yellow light washed down onto the face of the church. Illuminated by that amber glow were a series of stone sculptures inside niches — statuettes of monsters. Then I did begin to scream — and this time my voice was working fine.
Only now the arms that thrust themselves around me, shaking me and guiding me, weren’t the arms of faceless dark figures in a room — they were the arms of my fellow Buddhists in the meditation hall at Kensho.

After dinner. . . .
Claire sat with me on the porch this afternoon, holding my hand and stroking it. “I’ll be fine,” I kept telling her, not believing it for a moment. I was feeling incredibly shaky, my muscles seemed to be made of air, and whenever I attempted to stand my head started to spin. All notions I might have had of a solid, dependable reality have been utterly shattered. From a Buddhist perspective, I suppose this might be considered a good thing, as it points to the truth of the insubstantiality of all phenomena, including that of a personal, eternal self. But my experience in the Zendo wasn’t one of no-self — I had perceived the existence of mysterious Others who abide in a realm somehow accessible to my mind and who are capable, apparently, of physically touching me and doing things to my body. I have no doubt that this is what occurred — the large shapeless hands tapping my shoulder, the gyrating seated figure, the bright needles sticking out of my belly, were simply too real to dismiss as hallucinations, which I’ve never had in my life anyway. I’ve even managed to speculate about the existence of these creatures. If they are real beings in some realm accessible to the human mind, do they also possess Buddha nature like me? Is their being, at its core, fundamentally pure? But what do they want with me? What do I have that they need?
Throughout the afternoon, as I sat with Claire on the porch, people would come up to me and whisper kind words. “Hang in there, Joel,” was a typical refrain. After a couple of hours, holding Claire’s hand and sipping chamomile tea and watching the sun blink down through the trees, the dizziness in my head faded and it was almost as if things were back to normal. But then Claire swept me off my pedestal of fragile calm with this: “Where did you go to, anyway, before you screamed?”

Her earnest green eyes searched mine with curiosity, but I was totally confused by her question. “What do you mean?”

She flipped my hand over playfully. “I mean before it happened. I opened my eyes and saw that you weren’t on your bench. That you had left the zendo. It was strange to me, because I hadn’t heard you leave. You know that building. It’s so unstable on those stilts that any time someone leaves the whole floor shakes. But I didn’t hear you. I closed my eyes and just a second or two later you screamed and there you were, back on your bench.”
I felt a lump in my throat and swallowed down some June dust. “What are you talking about? I never left my bench. I was sitting there the whole time.”

Claire’s hand tightened on my wrist. “Joel, you weren’t there. When I opened my eyes a few seconds before your scream, your bench was empty. You had to have gone somewhere.”

As my chest tightened and the dizziness returned, I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. I squeezed Claire’s hand and felt the pulse in my ears pound like thunder. I breathed deeply and followed the breath, and noted, fear, fear, fear.

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