Ok, so now
it’s time to go off the charts and make some barely defensible claims. As I mentioned on my other blog, I spent a
lot of time in the past few months reading books on Buddhism in search of
whatever there was to be found. I don’t
remember what piqued my interest exactly, but when you’re on a spirit quest
you’ll grasp at just about any straw within reach and since I make regular
pilgrimages to Kiyomizu-dera (excuse that photo it's not often I find a picture of myself that strikes me as badass) and visit local temples for my birthday anyway (haha Rathwell), reading some actual words of
Buddhist wisdom seemed like a logical next step. There are a ton of different Buddhisms out
there, Mahayana, Theravada, Pure Land, Sokka Gakkai, probably more Sri Lankan, Indian, Chinese,
and Indonesian variants than you can count but I chose the one that, somewhat
embarrassingly, sounded coolest to me, which is to say that I bought a book about Zen.
The first book
I bought was a collection of old sayings called ほっとする禅語70, 70 Zen Sayings to Chill You Out, and in all honesty it sort of blew my mind. For a Japanese person it would probably be a
collection of relative truisms that wouldn’t move you beyond a shoulder shrug
(imagine a book explicating “birds of a feather flock together” and “don’t
count your chickens before they’re hatched), but sometimes words you didn’t
grow up with bypass your mental checkpoints and crash into your brain at full speed. The book was filled
with sayings that pointed the way to a Zen-inspired view of the everyday,
founded in refining conscious awareness, eliminating unnecessary thoughts and
unfounded worry, a realization of the interconnectedness of things, and the
sort of inner peace / calm for which it is popularly characterized (often
caricatured) in the West.
Part of the
reason I was so taken with this book is that it was an expression in clear and
simple words of concepts I had already gotten from other sources. I mentioned that I experimented some with meditation,
reading a book by a woman named Hosai Arina, titled simply 始めよう。瞑想, or, Starting
Meditation. If I didn’t have this
book rattling around in my head then it’s unlikely the later books on Zen would
have meant anything to me. I struggled through it in Japanese, so you can question the legitimacy of my arguments there if you'd like, but I like reading books on
traditionally “Eastern” topics in Japanese as much as possible because you can
get straight down to business. You don’t
have to wade through apologies on the inaccuracy of translation or primers on
culturally divergent value systems; instead it’s taken for granted that you are
embedded within the relevant value system and the only translation
going on is in your head, which has the effect of turning what might otherwise
seem a foreign, vaguely mysterious reading experience into something markedly
prosaic and concrete (that is my experience with cultural interaction in general; the process of learning a foreign language and becoming familiar with
different customs is the process of revealing the mystic other to be strikingly
familiar and mundane). This attitude is
precisely the one with which the author probably wants readers to approach her
book, as from nearly the first page she makes it clear that she intends to blow
aside the screen of ethereal vapors obfuscating popular conceptions of
meditation to disclose the non-supernatural kernel hiding within.
Let me put
this out there right away. I am pretty
terrible at meditation. I’m too
impatient, my apartment is too loud, I’m not willing to travel to an isolated
mountain temple, and all in all I’m too attached to my thoughts to really make
it work. That said, I think that I have
a pretty solid understanding of how it’s supposed to work, and since the
mechanics of meditation are instrumental to my understanding of Buddhist
enlightenment, let me spend a paragraph or two spelling them out.
Every book
I’ve read on Zen or meditation mentions something like the term 「雑念」”Zatsunen,” or, in English, the random stuff that floats into you
mind when you close your eyes. Or when
you’re standing there waiting in line for something, or when you’re lying in
bed trying to fall asleep, or any other time you’re not doing anything and your
mind wanders. According to Hosai, (and very
much in accordance with the established scientific view) the mind is a powerful
and largely automated problem-solving tool that will invent issues to work on
rather than sit in silence and risk leaving something important undone. What goes in is unconsciously and
involuntarily filed away for processing, and when you aren’t consciously
focusing on another task you’ll notice (I notice, at least) that this queue of data is always playing under the surface like a radio at low volume. Even if you’re not aware of it (or so used to
it that you don’t even realize what’s going on), constantly worrying immaterial problems is a real source of stress and unnecessary mental fatigue,
and as Hosai presents it in her book, meditation is a practical means of emptying
your brain of dead-end thoughts.
And that’s
pretty much where she leaves it. Your brain
takes in external stimuli and throws them in your face in moments of inactivity regardless of whether you need to be dealing with them or not. When I was
biking home today, I caught myself fretting over word-choice in mental lectures
that I’ll never give, and while you could say that I was sharpening my vocabulary
I’d counter that wasting my energy. If you get good at meditation, you can learn
to drain your head of zatsunen like
fluid from a wound. I won’t get into the
mechanics, but it essentially entails sitting quietly, drawing zatsunen out with a mantra (in this case
a short, meaningless phrase repeated over and over), by focusing on your
breathing, or through any other boring and repetitive activity (the thinking is
that your brain is programmed to seek out problems and isn’t capable of
peacefully repeating nonsensical ohms if
it can possibly latch onto anything else), one by one folding and shelving
stray thoughts like shirts strewn across the floor of your mind. When you’ve cleared the room of dirty
laundry, in theory, no more thoughts should surface so you can drop the mantras
and proceed to enjoy a period of restorative silence that is supposed to have
all sorts of positive health benefits such as sharpening your focus, improving
your memory, making you more cheerful, and generally giving you more pep in
your step to hop to the beat of the everyday.
I tried
pretty hard for a few months to figure that shit out but don’t think I ever got
past the gathering-of-useless-thoughts stage.
Try focusing on the rhythmic intonation of nonsense words while sitting
still and half-lidded in a darkened room for fifteen minutes at a time. O-n,
Na-m, Suba-ha, am I there yet, is this it, oh shit, O-n, Na-m, this inner dialogue is exactly what I’m supposed to be flushing,
I wonder if it’s dark enough in here, O-n, Na stoppit, maybe it’s too loud O-n ah
fuck it I give up. That’s pretty much
how it went for me, but, I wouldn’t say that I was out there chasing
rainbows. In principal it all makes
sense, and plenty of people have experienced just such a meditation-induced
clarity of mind to make me believe that it’s a real phenomenon. I just can’t do it.
Which
doesn’t mean, however, that I believe people in a meditative trance to be
partaking in the Universal Buddha Essence.
Not unless the Universal Buddha Essence is a metaphor for
right-hemispheric brain activity, that is.
This post is getting long and unwieldy so I will cut it off here, but
next time I want to talk about the neuroscientist who lost all left-brain
functioning in a massive stroke and then got it back, and what her experiences in
the right side of her head suggest, at least to me, about meditation and by
extension the brain-state Buddhists have always called Enlightenment.
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