In this issue:
More than thirty years ago, not long after I began training with Rev. Master Koshin and the Seattle meditation group, I attended a week-long lay retreat at Shasta Abbey. It was there that I experienced a “teachable moment” in meditation that has stayed with me all these years. It was one of those “when all conditions ripen” experiences we all have when we are not the same afterwards. And it confirmed for me at an early point in my training just how powerful and transformative pure meditation can be.
It was the 6 a.m. meditation period, and we were meditating in the ceremony hall. It was summertime, and hot. All of the windows and the big doors of the hall were wide open. The Abbey grounds are situated just a couple hundred yards from I-5, one of the busiest interstates in the U.S. Day and night, there’s an incessant flow of traffic rushing past that only stops in winter when a blizzard shuts down the freeway for a short time.
I was to learn that the freeway noise is problematic for many people when they come to the Abbey. It certainly was for me that morning. There’s a line in one of our core scriptures, The Most Excellent Mirror Samadhi, that says “If outwardly all calm we do appear—and yet within disturbed should be/We are as if a tethered horse or as a mouse within a cage…”. I’m sure I looked calm to an outside observer, all cross-legged and upright and completely still on my cushion as I had been taught. But within…well, I was definitely running flat out in the exercise wheel of the mouse cage of my mind chasing the noise of the freeway.
I remember focusing on the traffic and seething in my mind, “Who ever heard of putting a contemplative monastery next to a freeway?!? This is crazy! How are you supposed to meditate with all this noise?!?” My mind was caught in an endless loop of frustration and irritation, going 'round and 'round and ‘round.
And then, a truly miraculous thing happened: a semi truck roared past and blasted its monstrous airhorn at the exact same time as a bird in one of the pines outside the hall sang a delicate and beautiful song. The two comingled in the same airspace…and I was thunderstruck with the realization that fundamentally they were the exact same thing: just vibrations in the air. And I was the one projecting “bad” on the horn and “good” on the birdsong. I was setting up the opposites and thereby creating suffering for myself. The noise was in my mind, and my mind itself was noise. It was a deep, “whole body-mind” revelation that would not have been possible without having prepared the ground with pure meditation, and if I had not been expressing my nascent faith then and there by just being in that hall making the effort, in summer, when more “fun” diversions were available elsewhere.
Projecting our ideas and opinions on the world is a primary source of suffering, both for ourselves and the beings we interact with. In this case, I was projecting onto the Abbey my vague idea of what a monastery “should be.” I have no idea where that opinion came from, having been raised a thorough Protestant where monasteries were nowhere in the narrative. But that is often the case with our opinions: they are half-formed by random external inputs we absorb without even being aware of them, and they coalesce into hard and fast “truths” about how the world “should be.” We feel safe and self-satisfied in our half-baked projections, and when the world doesn’t conform to them our self-image feels threatened and we become frightened and defensive, habitually reacting with anger and violence, whether internal or external.
In our very first meditation instruction we are told to not push away unhappy or distressing thoughts, nor cling to pleasant or happy thoughts. As Dogen’s Rules For Meditation instructs: “Just sitting, with no deliberate [i.e., grasping or rejecting] thought, is the important aspect of serene reflection meditation.” Pure meditation helps us learn how to get ourselves out of the way of reality and just experience what is.
I think of our ongoing interior monologue as a kind of movie we project on the world. It’s a soap opera of thoughts/feelings/fears/desires/memories/speculations…. But with pure meditation it’s as if we splice into the filmstrip clear and empty frames that reveal the luminous, pure nature of the true reality of the screen itself free of the shadows and noise we project onto it. In life, it is the luminous “void, unstained, and pure” of the Eternal as described in The Scripture of Great Wisdom. In life, the “screen” our lives are projected on is the compassion, love, and wisdom of the Eternal: that’s the Reality hosting the projection, and without which there is no story. The passing episodes of our brief lives are moving shadows. As we play out the story of our lives, we will suffer less if we do not mistake the projected shadows for Reality, or believe that the story is only about our own self.
After that morning the freeway traffic receded into the background and stopped being aggravating noise and more like a river flowing past. It was still always there, but it did not dominate my consciousness as it had. In fact, I am grateful now for having learned to meditate beside that freeway and just accept it, because the temple here is right next to a busy street. If I had only experienced meditation in a quiet, peaceful, idyllic setting—a “proper” fantasy monastery—I would probably still be endlessly running on the wheel in the cage of my mind, chasing but never catching the cars outside.