One Time, One Meeting

Picture, if you will, a horse and rider. The horse is galloping down a road, and the rider is hanging on for dear life.

“Where are you going?”calls a man from the side of the road.

“I don’t know,” answers the rider. “Ask the horse.”

According to Zen teachings, the horse in this story represents the force of habit, or what Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “habit energies.” Whether we’re aware of them or not, those energies drive our lives, even when we’re sleeping. They rush us into the future, and we may feel powerless to stop them. In his poem “Habits” the American poet W.S. Merwin acknowledges as much. “Even in the middle of the night,” he writes of his habits, “They go on handing me around.”*

I suspect that most of us are familiar with that experience. In my own case, I recall a Saturday afternoon when I found myself heading toward Wegman’s, though I was supposed to be driving to the Valu Home Center to buy some paint. My horse was a Honda Accord, but the pattern was much the same.

Habits may be pleasant, healthful, and productive. They may also protect us, or comfort us during a crisis. But habits of mind can dull our sensibilities and distort our perceptions of other people. And in the arts, they can harden into stylistic tics and conceptual cliches, impeding the creative spirit. Perhaps that is why Nadia Boulanger, the legendary teacher and composer, once declared that she loved tradition but despised habit.

In Zen practice we do not despise habit or consign it to a mental perdition. We do not try to transcend it. Rather, we sit still, cultivating an awareness of our breath, our bodies, our changing mental states. Over time, we may notice that certain patterns of thought and feeling arise again and again. We acknowledge their presence, as we might acknowledge bits of songs that come and go.”Hello, habit energies,” says Thich Nhat Hanh to his own.

This is a simple but potent practice, and as it deepens, we may find that the force of our habits diminishes proportionately. Where before there was only the habit, now there is both the habit and our awareness. And as we become ever more mindful, we empower ourselves to form new and more wholesome habits—and to drop those that do us harm.

If we continue to cultivate such awareness, we may discover that our habits have roots deeper and broader than the personal. They are grounded in our histories, familial and social, and they are fed by contemporary culture. In totalitarian countries, people live with the habit of suspicion. In our own, we are living with the habit of fear, whether its object be sickness, aging, a destitute retirement, or a terrorist attack. Every night, the news and the Big Pharma ads nourish that habit of feeling.

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If you are a homeowner in Alfred, New York, you may have heard of Orangeburg pipe. Widely used for drainage and sewer lines, it is best described as ten layers of tarpaper rolled up to form a pipe. Orangeburg takes its name from Orangeburg, New York, its point of manufacture. Properly seated in a bed of sand, Orangeburg might last fifty years. Or it might not.

Last month, I learned these facts the hard way. With little warning, our sewer line backed up, and our basement flooded. We called a plumber, and when his power snake brought back dirt, we knew we were in for some serious digging. Twenty-four hours later, in a trench where our lawn had been, we laid eyes on the cause of our misery. Sure enough, it was a length of Orangeburg pipe, flattened and degraded. Calling it a name not fit to print, I wondered why anyone would choose such a product, let alone trust it to last.

The answers weren’t far to seek. Orangeburg pipe gained popularity in the decade after World War II, when iron and steel were in short supply. Contractors liked it because it was user-friendly and readily available. Homeowners liked it because it was cheap. By the standards of its day, it was a serviceable product, if hardly top of the line. That it would one day fall apart was the future homeowner’s problem.

Whatever its merits as a plumbing component, Orangeburg pipe well illustrates a central focus of Zen training. For in Zen teachings we learn of “the impermanence of all conditioned things,” whether those things be our sewer lines, our bodies, our thoughts, our relationships, or our very lives. And in Zen practice, we come to know the truth of impermanence through direct experience.

That all things change is hardly breaking news. A few years ago, as I was waiting for a TV show to resume, the words “Embrace change” flashed on the screen. While that sounded like something a Zen master might say, the purveyor of this advice turned out to be Rochester Gas and Electric. It would seem that awareness of impermanence has at long last entered the American mainstream.

Yet it is one thing to have a conceptual understanding of impermanence and quite another to experience it concretely. In Zen meditation we cultivate a continuous awareness of impermanence not through the contemplation of lofty verities but through an intimate contact with changes as they are unfolding, moment by moment and breath by breath. We notice that no two breaths are quite the same. And if we are really paying attention, we notice that everything is changing, including our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and states of mind. Neither we nor the world’s bright things are as solid as we’d supposed.

Or, if we prefer, we can contemplate Orangeburg pipe

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Not so long ago, the journalist Michael Crowley, who was covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the New Republic, reported a conversation with the “makeup artist” in charge of preparing the candidates for the debates. Was Hillary a basket case, he asked, in those final moments before she went on? On the contrary, the makeup artist replied. “Sitting in the makeup chair seems to be one of the few moments of zenlike peace the candidates ever get.”*

Of all the images projected by the current presidential race, the spectacle of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the others sitting in “zenlike peace” in their makeup chairs is one of the more diverting. Yet if that image highlights a certain absurdity in the present campaign, it also reflects a popular view of Zen meditation. According to this view, to sit in zazen is to abide in perfect peace, untroubled by such things as one’s perilous standing in the polls. In the serene mind of the Zen practitioner, such worrisome thoughts—and thoughts in general—have ceased to exist, leaving a space as blank as an unmarked ballot.

Prevalent though they are, such perceptions of Zen attainment have little to do with the daily practice of Zen meditation. To be sure, Zen masters through the centuries have described the state of satori, in which ordinary, dualistic consciousness dissolves, and self and world become one. But as the modern Zen master Kosho Uchiyama warns us in his book Opening the Hand of Thought, “to think that people become great by doing zazen, or to think that you are going to gain satori, is to be sadly misled by your own illusion.”** For the aim of Zen practice is not to attain a state of continuous bliss or permanent contentment. Rather, it is to cultivate a clear and open awareness, within which transitory mental states, however calm or vexed, are recognized for what they are.

When practicing zazen, we adopt a stable, upright posture, aligning ourselves with the earth’s gravitational force. We settle into stillness, and we rest in awareness. Within that sky-like awareness, thoughts arrive and depart, as if they were passing clouds. Some are luminous and wispy, others dense and dark. But if we remain in awareness and do not pursue them, our thought-clouds leave as readily as they came. Uchiyama calls this process “opening the hand of thought,” and he describes it in this way:

When we let go of our conceptions, there is no other possible reality than what is right now. . . Dwelling here and now in this reality, letting go of all the accidental things that arise in our minds, is what I mean by “opening the hand of thought.” ***

Uchiyama contrasts this state of open awareness with our usual state of mind, in which we grasp at the objects of our thoughts, fashioning scenarios to suit our needs.

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About ten years ago, I wrote a check for $ 57.00 to the Village of Water. At the time, I was attempting to pay my water bill. Oblivious of my oversight, I mailed the check, and somehow the Village of Alfred managed to cash it. When the bank returned the canceled check, as banks used to do, I discovered my blunder.

What was I thinking? I asked myself. Or as my mother would have said, Whatever possessed you? The script was neat, the handwriting definitely mine. The check bore my signature. But whoever wrote the “Village of Water” was miles away at the time.

However extreme, my error was not uncommon. Nor was it peculiar to professors. Quite possibly, the chickadees at our feeder and the deer who eat our dogwoods live continuously in the present. They have to. But we human beings have the option of being elsewhere, and that elsewhere is often the future or the past. And when we are not revisiting the past or rehearsing the future, we are often absorbed in abstract thought.

To return us to the present moment is the first purpose of Zen meditation. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes the practice in this way:

Meditation means you have to be present in the present moment. If the body is here but the mind is wandering elsewhere, in that moment you’re not present—you’re not present for yourself, and you’re not present for your husband, your children, your brothers or sisters, your nation, or your people. That is the opposite of meditation. Being present in the present moment means you are not being imprisoned by the past or sucked up by the future.

As Thich Nhat Hanh further explains, being present in the present moment does not preclude reflection, planning, or visionary thought. Rather, it returns the wandering mind, which doesn’t know it is wandering, to an awareness of whatever it is up to.

In Zen teachings, this capacity for being present is known as mindfulness, and it is an essential component of Zen discipline. Mindfulness may be cultivated in many ways, but at the beginning we can best develop it by sitting still, with our spines straight and the rest of our bodies relaxed. Maintaining that posture for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, we bring a gentle, non-judgmental attention to our breath, our feelings, our passing thoughts, our changing states of mind. We become present for ourselves.

But can we also become present for other people? Beneficial though it is, the mindfulness cultivated in seated meditation is of limited value if it does not extend into our daily lives, where our presence—and often, our absence—profoundly affects others around us. “When you walk,” Zen teachers tell us, “just walk.” That admonishment directs us to give undivided attention to the one thing we are doing, be it cooking dinner, or writing a check, or listening to a friend. Mindfulness of this kind grows naturally from the habit of daily sitting, but it it may also be practiced by anyone at any time.

By way of demonstration, may I suggest that if you are drinking a cup of coffee while you are reading this column, put down your coffee and give full attention to the column. Or better yet, put down the column and give full attention to your coffee. Hold the cup in both hands, as Zen monks do, and inhale the aroma. Contemplate the origins, the history, and the nature of the drink you are about to ingest. Then drink your coffee, giving full attention to its taste. Continue this practice for a week or more, and see what you discover.

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Twelve years ago, some friends and I formed a sitting group in the community of Alfred, New York. Our intent was to provide a place of stillness and silence and  to cultivate the practices of sitting and walking meditation, as taught by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of us brought prior experience in Eastern meditation. All of us brought our Western conditioning.

So it was with one of our number, an anxious former New Yorker, who arrived one Sunday evening looking unusually impatient, even for him.

“Well,” said he, rubbing his hands and bouncing from one foot to the other, “let’s get meditating.”

As we later learned, Barbara Walters was interviewing Monica Lewinsky at nine o’clock that evening, and he didn’t want to miss a word.

In his general outlook if not his specific motive, our friend was not alone. On the contrary, American culture has been described as always en route to somewhere else, always busy and always in a hurry. And with the advent of e-mail, Twitter, and other forms of advanced technology, our habitual rush into the future has grown more furious than ever. Meditation is supposed to be about “stopping and looking”—or at least about slowing down. But to those attached to ceaseless forward movement, even an hour devoted to stopping and looking can become one more step on the way to somewhere else.

The desire to be in some other place, and to get there as soon as possible, is both a symptom and a cause of a general anxiety, driving us into the future even as we fear it. Over the past decade a wide variety of people, including students, faculty, social workers, police, and clergy, have attended our Sunday-evening sessions. Some have come out of boredom, curiosity, loneliness, or a desire to find a deeper meaning in their lives.  But the root motive is often anxiety, which Thich Nhat Hanh has called the endemic illness of Western culture. Better get moving, its voices tell us. Better get meditating.

Zen meditation is not a panacea for anxiety, as sometimes thought, nor is it a drug-free cure. But the practice can provide an antidote, a countervailing force in our busy-busy lives. In the simplest form of Zen meditation, we sit as still and upright as we can manage, doing nothing but following the flow of our breath and paying attention to whatever is occurring, within us and around us. We note the tensions in our bodies, the eruption of a voice down the hall. We note a passing thought—where are my car keys?—or a remembered image. And we observe those impulses that urge us to keep moving—to get meditating—and hurl us into the future. When we have sat for awhile, our bodies begin to settle, and our thoughts arrive at a slower pace. And as we stop trying to control our environment, our immediate surroundings present themselves with greater clarity and vivacity. We feel more alive as well as more relaxed.

Such are the immediate benefits of Zen meditation, which may be felt in a matter of weeks. But it would be a mistake to think of Zen practice as merely a stress-reduction technique, or a mode of self-improvement, or a way of escaping from the world. The reduction of stress might better be viewed as a point of entry–a portal into an ancient contemplative practice. Over time, that practice teaches us to appreciate our lives, however hurried or fragmented their present state, and to align our anxious minds with things as they are, not as we would have them be. And rather than isolate us, the practice deepens our connection with other people.

I intend to say more about these matters in future essays. In the meantime, let’s get meditating.

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