8 August, 2023.

A melange of experiences in today’s zazen: I don’t know if writing about them can possibly approximate the time itself.  I hoped to meditate with that spirit of wu-wei I wrote about yesterday.  At the same time I thought that it was time to meditate more directly on my death.  And despite these wishes, it was a day of the usual scattered thoughts, words, dialogues, resentments spooling out through the space of my meditation.  And despite that, it was a happy, peaceful meditation, that led me to an external smile I will have to think more about; it came so naturally to my lips, but I hope it was not some self-satisfied imitation of Buddhas I’ve seen with their calm, wise smiles.  I think the true spirit of wu-wei today was expressed in my complete ease with and indifference to the spooling thoughts that have in the past so distracted me from the meditation I thought I was supposed to achieve.  Indeed, the smile may have had something to do with my sudden understanding how wholly natural, spontaneous, fundamental such wordy thoughts are in the human mind.  It was as if in meditation I could view all such distractions and frustrations with a kind of detached amusement.  They did not cease, though they came and went; yet they really did not trouble or ripple the pond on which I was resting.

In the midst of this distinct experience of zazen, I did indeed somehow meditate on death.  I began to understand myself, in the words and ideas of Watts, as something (not merely something) the Tao is doing—waving, as it were, as a human hand waves, or as a tall plant waves on its stem in the wind.  Therefore death is merely the end of the body in which the Tao briefly encased its own proliferative and gentle energies, and the passage out of the body is a genuine loss of distinction from the Way.  Meanwhile I suddenly saw that so much of the self I fear losing in death—my unique being, history, consciousness, experience, longing, creativity—is no great loss: in death I will also lose peevishness, resentment, fear, bitterness, judgmentalism, shallowness, anger.  The enduring fear, then, is only for my best self, its distinctions suddenly lost at that moment of ending.  But one might also think that one’s best self is that expression that the Tao has made of itself in the world; that unique awareness may be surrendered, but all that one truly is will be folded back into the flow that was its source.            

These many words do not begin to approximate the intuitions through which I passed in my twenty minutes of sitting.  They over-elaborate, complicate, distance the experience, which was one of great comfort, even pleasure.  That these intuitions should arise in the context of that same dissonant, noisy meditation I described first is remarkable to me.  They were one and the same experience.  For a little while, I understood something.