Letter #14: Zen Zere Was None

Meditation's End

Klavanites.

Yesterday, I wrote about my years of practicing Zen meditation, or zazen. This is how that practice came to an end.

One Spring day — around 1990 — I was walking on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, along the border of Central Park. A thought came to me unbidden: “No God.” Suddenly, my mind went silent. Ideas, daydreams — gone. A darkness pure and still. The world around me burst into vivid thereness with a new pristine clarity and beauty. The inexplicable precepts of Zen all at once became wholly comprehensible. I was experiencing satori, an abrupt state of enlightenment. The wondrous bliss and presence lasted about an hour, then faded away.

Many Christian readers have asked me why the words: “No God,” were the gateway into this moment of illumination. Some have suggested I was really being told to “Know God.” One friend recently told me she thought I was being tempted by the devil. Myself, I suspect the voice that was then in my head was not God’s voice at all. It was, instead, the voice of my own haunted history, that voice we all have within us that is the echo of old traumas and buried yearnings. I think perhaps that voice and its delusions needed to be silenced before I could perceive the sheer being of being, the living-and-dying thing itself.

Here’s what was odd though. Over the weeks that followed, my meditation became distasteful to me. To sit and think of nothing seemed little more than a rehearsal for death.

Many Westerners have said that the idea of striving toward nirvana — extinction — seems life-negating. Only a Buddhist can know whether this is so or not. I can only say that it began to seem so to me. Meditate long enough on nothing and, of course, everything becomes nothing. If I had meditated on clowns, everything would have become a circus.

Yet Jesus also has something to say about letting go of life. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.” [Matthew 10:39]

That “for my sake,” though — that makes all the difference. In Buddhism, as I experienced it through zazen, the world is revealed to be an illusion, a movie playing on the screen of the mind. But in Christianity, that work of art is the material expression of the artist, the living God. Yes, what seems a steadfast reality is only the flickering shadows of eternal creation and destruction — the projection of an unquenchable fire, you might say, burning on a bush that is never consumed. But when we experience that burning bush rightly, it is not nothing. It speaks to us of a person, a person named I AM, a person made manifest in Jesus Christ.

How, then, can we learn to live life so that it always speaks God’s nature to us?

I’ll write about that tomorrow.