My journey through the excesses of young manhood and into Zen Buddhism.
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It’s 7pm again: time to go and sit on my little black cushion and stare at the wall. My loving girlfriend agrees to come and get me from the next room in thirty minutes, and I settle down with my left foot on my right thigh and my right foot on my left thigh, and then I stare at one small spot on the wall until the world stops spinning.
I began to feel that society’s acceptance of me was conditional upon my ability to display a strong exterior. We men all feel this, and so we teach ourselves not to show emotion or weakness.
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People often look at me strangely when I tell them about all the time I spend staring at walls, as if I should be out gallivanting and experiencing the vitality and richness of the bustling youth culture here in London, or occupying myself with something at the very least. I can see things from their point of view. After all, this time last year, you probably would have found me, not cross-legged on a zabuton, but stretched out on the sofa at 7pm, tucking into some beans on toast and waiting for a text that would mean it was time to stop watching EastEnders and head off to the pub to talk a great deal about something really important over a beer and the (not very) occasional cigarette. This is, of course, what is to be expected of any young 20-something in the UK today, and I, not willing to be any exception, readily adhered to this strict societal code of conduct. From the sprouting of my first pubescent chin-hairs until the ripe old age of 21, I did my very best to be one of the cultural masses – and I got pretty good at it, too. So, what changed? Actually, as happens eventually with everything in this 21st-Century living, I got bored.
I have recently learned that it is not unusual for us to traverse through life feeling, like I did, as though there were a glass screen between ourselves and the rest of the world. Hard as we try, we repeatedly find ourselves unable to breach the boundary of our own bodies. We create, we socialise, we have sex, we consume psychotropic drugs; all in an effort to extend ourselves beyond ourselves and connect in some way with the outside world. I practised all of these and more, only to find my head aching again with each collision into the invisible glass barrier.
Despite my best efforts, I was condemned to a future filled with isolation – given a life sentence inside my head. This was in part because, as a young man, I began to feel that society’s acceptance of me was conditional upon my ability to display a strong exterior. We men all feel this, and so we teach ourselves not to show emotion or weakness. The number of conversations I have had with male friends about my darkest emotional issues could be counted on one hand, while many women maintain the much healthier habit of reaching out to friends and family at times of emotional peril.
This outward desensitisation forces our perspective deeply inward, until we find our minds ceaselessly chattering on from thought to thought, so much so that we forget we are anything but an endless stream of noise. Eckhart Tolle writes, in his bestselling book, The Power of Now, that the greatest obstacle to truly experiencing reality is “identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive”. This was me: a mind, trapped inside a body, trying to see some kind of truth through a misty haze of over-thinking.
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There are many misconceptions about what is meant by meditation and, truthfully, the variations of it practised around the world are myriad.
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But, like I said, I got bored and so, as I often do when I get bored, I started searching for something else. I bought some books. Bouncing back and forth like a literary pinball, I read Freud, Jung, Nietzsche. I read some crappy travel books and some great autobiographies, and I started to fill up my head with new ideas. These ideas grew and grew into a swirling maelstrom of grandiose concepts and dinner-party anecdotes, and the rift betwixt the world and me only grew deeper as a result. Then one day, as I was browsing the ‘Religion’ section of a Kensington bookshop, in search of my next fix, I pulled out a book and saw, printed on the back, the smiling face of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.
The book was the classic, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, a collection of lectures by the Zen master responsible for setting up the San Francisco Zen Center, the first Soto Zen practice centre in the West. In it, I found one core message: you don’t need to achieve anything, own anything or be anyone to find enlightenment – all you need to do is learn to let go of duality. This changed everything, and it made perfect sense. The problems we create in life are not problems at all, they are just situations. It is our choice to identify them as problems, and our reasons for doing so are really only based in our ideas of bad and good. Today’s meal is only as tasty as yesterday’s was tasteless. Your job is only as unfulfilling as your evenings and weekends are deeply satisfying. The ‘problem’ is not your job or yesterday’s meal, it is your understanding. But do not fear, there is a salvation, and it may be closer than you think.
The key to unlocking the glass wall behind which we all spend our lives can be found in one word: zazen (seated meditation). There are many misconceptions about what is meant by meditation and, truthfully, the variations of it practised around the world are myriad. Zen meditation itself is not really meditation at all, or else it might be the only true form of meditation there is. Zazen means simply sitting, on a cushion, staring at a wall. Actually, the wall is irrelevant, it just provides a nice context to my sitting, but you can sit anywhere you like. The key is to practise this sitting as wholeheartedly as you possibly can.
Through this sitting, I believe, it might just be possible to create a gap of what Buddhists call ‘no-mind’ …
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By doing this you actually can dissolve the obscuring cloud of thought in each moment. There is no duality when you sit. Sitting is not ‘not standing’, it is sitting – there is no standing when you sit. When you inhale, there is no such thing as exhalation. When you exhale, exhalation is all there is. Rather than rushing about doing things to try and announce to the world who we are, in sitting it is actually not possible to be anything other than ourselves. Because of this, our sitting actually becomes the most genuine possible expression of our true nature. It is neither an internal nor an external experience, it is just an activity in which there is no inside or outside, there is only sitting. You may call me crazy, but that’s ok. I will just keep sitting.
Through this sitting, I believe, it might just be possible to create a gap of what Buddhists call ‘no-mind’ for just long enough to see the truth beyond ourselves and slip through the bars to escape this life sentence of thought.
As Dogen-Zenji writes to us from the Eihei monastery in medieval Japan, “engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire”.
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