Seeing Into the Darkness

This time of year, we Zen Buddhists, like the followers of most wisdom traditions are concerned with darkness and light. We tell the story of a young man who left the comfort of his familiar surroundings to set off on a pilgrimage to find the meaning of life-and-death. After a long and arduous search, he settled into the darkness of one tumultuous night, vowing not to move until he understood the truth of life. Seeing the morning star rising the next morning, he had a great realization of the nature of life and was set free.

Every pilgrimage begins with leaving home. Even the virtual Zen Zoom retreats we’ve been holding since May, the ones that take place right where we are, require a leaving of the familiar routine. We intentionally step back from the normal flow of ‘the way things are’ in order to begin to see into the conditions of our lives that are mostly hidden from us.

We humans are like the young fish that David Foster Wallace described in his commencement address at Kenyan College in 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

The title of Wallace’s address that day was ‘This Is Water’ and these are his opening lines.   Wallace goes on to present himself not as the wise old fish offering platitudes for to the young graduates, but rather he boldly claims his status as a deluded human being:

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.

As Wallace points out in the joke and elucidates here, we live in midst of delusions that are so close they are invisible to us. Zen retreats offer us the possibility to see into the nature of the mistaken ideas of separation and inflation that we barely notice in our everyday lives. All spiritual practices and retreats offer the possibility of de-centering the self and seeing though our deluded ideas of importance and control.

Another example of ‘the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of’ is our equation that comfort is good and discomfort is bad—the easy is to be preferred and the difficult is to be avoided. Our basic urge is to control the universe and get more of what we want and less of what we don’t want. While this is healthy to some extent, when this is the unconscious driving force of our lives, we are in trouble. We are neither the center of nor the master of the universe. This is the bad news and the good news.

Leaving familiar surroundings and engaging in spiritual practices can allow us to begin to see the operation of these and other hidden delusions that keep us scurrying around on a desperate search for happiness. On Zen retreats, the discipline of sitting upright and still for long periods of time allows us to come face-to-face with our urge to control the universe. We human beings naturally turn away from things we don’t like and toward things we do like. Though this is basically a healthy impulses, when all we do is turn toward comfort and away from difficulty, our lives become smaller and smaller. Our natural freedom to follow what we love is eroded by our need for safety and security.

Simply sitting still allows us to see the operation of this endless desire for comfort and allows us to cultivate the courage to choose for ourselves. When the urge to scratch my cheek arises, though I may feel like I really need to scratch, if I resist that urge, I can begin to learn that sensations come and go. The same with discomfort in the body. While we need to be wise and not go to extremes that would injure our bodies, there is a fair degree of aches and pains that we can merely watch arise and pass away.

We can begin to greet the urgencies of our minds—‘I must do this.’ ‘I must have that.’ ‘I cannot tolerate this.’—with a little more spaciousness. Our minds, in many ways, are like two-year-olds that just want what they want when they want it. ‘If I can’t have that new toy, there is no meaning to my life.’ ‘If you won’t do exactly what I want, I won’t ever talk to you again.’ Though we can laugh at these silly examples, on some primal level the delusion runs deep. Of course we see clearly and are reasonable and should always get our way. Only when we begin to see how subtly greed, anger and ignorance operate, can we begin to awaken to our true freedom.

It’s a never-ending path, this road to freedom. The little self is wondrously persistent and creative. Though we all have moments where we see through the thin façade of rushing around trying to get and be particular things, we are all endlessly limited and deluded.

Going on retreat, we have to come back. Climbing to the top of the mountain, we get a wonderful view, but then, as we keep walking, we naturally walk down the other side and back into the valleys and forests of everyday life. This is not a problem or a mistake. Everything comes and goes, even our great liberating insight.

This is the water we swim in, the water that is our life.  This is why we keep practicing—keep meditating—keep praying—keep retreating. This endless journey is our great freedom and our great joy.