redux: Zazen v. Nancy

This time last year, I read Norweigan Wood and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. Before even the first page was finished, I found my mind start drifting, and I could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. I felt as if I knew Naoko, but was unable to place precisely how or whom.

Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

Was it a trap door?

Ever watched a rabbit emerge from hat?

Those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. Is it messianic time flowing in two directions? Everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. Sometimes I walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.

Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)

Another point that stood out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. No-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings.

Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. The Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though I'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (Not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) The no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. Unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms and parking lots.

The only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence - the atman, in other words.

(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)

[lapse]

A man walks into a store.
The clerk asks, "Atman or no-self?"
The man answers, "One of each please."

[return]

Either way, it doesn't really matter. The answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. Until then, one continues to sit...