When I was 19 and deeply involved in trying to figure out who I was, I heard a lecture by the philosopher of eastern religions, Alan Watts and read several of his books. He helped change how I felt about life.
When I thought ahead to the future, it seemed so big. A vast number of days, and a huge weight to carry. So many questions: how do I decide on a career? What should I do with all this time I have? How can I do some good? Thanks to Watts and others, especially to a few inspiring teachers, instead of a life of tasks and burdens mixed with occasional pleasures, I began to see depth and beauty; began to realize how my own response, attitude, and openness shaped the reality I experienced.
Three books by Watts stand out for me. The first: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. The second: The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for An Age of Anxiety. The subtitle of the latter book, published in 1951, is certainly an appropriate label for today.
In another book, The Way of Zen, Watts not only explains his view of Zen history and practice but introduces the reader to four different moods often found in and characteristic of Zen and Japanese arts. It was a new thought for me that a philosophy could be expressed in a few distinct moods. These moods are, in Japanese, sabi, wabi, aware (a-wa-re), and yugen.
Understanding these moods can reveal unexpected ways to live life more directly and skillfully. The Way of Zen describes how the arts can be a way of practice and gives examples of poetry brewed in the four moods. Especially in these troubling times, when I read these poems, my mind and heart settles and comes alive. I discern better how to respond with strength even to the toughest situations and feel appreciation and gratitude for so much I have been given. These moods also reveal different ways and stages of meditation practice.
When we look at the breadth of the future, we can get lost. To make a decision, it helps to feel the truth of what is in and around us. There isn’t an infinity of moments ahead of us, only one.
As much as I understand it, Sabi, according to Watts, is when we get quiet and feel detached from our usual concerns⎼ worries, social media, plans, and expectations. Silence is not the absence of sound or thought, but being present, not judgmental or grasping, to sound and thought. We focus, for example, on one breath at a time, one place, one thing. We can see anything or “all things as happening ‘by themselves’ in marvelous spontaneity.” The poet, translator, Lucien Stryck called sabi, “…the feeling of isolation at the midpoint of an emotion when it is both welcome and unwelcome, the source of ease and unease…” It is the recognition of beauty in asymmetry, imperfection, and the yearning to go beyond a superficial understanding.
Wabi, I think, is similar to sabi. It is a sense of simplicity and purity. Watts said the mood can arise when we feel sad or depressed and we notice the uselessness of much of our concerns. We catch a glimpse of the ordinary in its “incredible suchness.” The sincerity. Stryck said it is the feeling of something previously ignored now seen as precious. This very moment is all we have. The ordinary is no longer ordinary. The philosopher and environmentalist Henry David Thoreau spoke of being “self-sufficient with an insufficiency of things.”
It’s the simple that will save us. It has been said that we can’t take our money or possessions with us into death. We can’t take anything, except what’s in us at that moment. How can we accept this moment is gone before we even recognize it’s here? That death is always with us?
Aware is the sadness we feel over the passing of things, how summer becomes fall, and fall winter. We have something, and then it’s gone. It’s new, fresh, and then aged. It’s that moment between sorrow and regret. It’s the awareness that thoughts and emotions sparkle and then dissipate, a type of acceptance that allows us to live everything fully, even sadness.
And who wants to live by spending much energy suppressing fear, suppressing our lives, suppressing the knowledge that we don’t know what the next moment will be like?
Which leads us to yugen, the most untranslatable of the moods. Yu means cloudy, gen means impenetrability, unknowability. It’s a sense of the mysterious in everything that makes up nature. Watts called it a hint of the unknown or unknowable, the never to be discovered, in all of what’s before us. The famous Japanese philosopher and Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki said it’s the supreme attainment in all the arts, maybe even in the art of meditation, when there is no sense of a “mediating agent between the artistic inspiration and the mind into which it has come.” When the painter feels they are themselves the subject and object being painted, or the meditator feels they are being breathed, not a self separated from the process of breathing.
One day in the early morning, I was walking through the forest near my home and a fog was moving in, covering everything, turning the world indistinct. Hazy. And suddenly, the head of a deer was there before me, staring at me through the fog, as if the body of the deer was the fog itself. And I stood there with it, rooted to that spot. Not one thought in my mind. The whole universe became just us, just this. And then it was gone.
At dusk, do you ever watch the last light of day disappearing? Instead of a blanket being pulled down over our eyes, it’s more like the light buried in things is draining away. For a few moments, only the outline of whatever we look at is there, tall trees or buildings, dark against a darkening sky. And then it’s night.
And then there are the crickets. Especially in late summer and early fall, in the late afternoon, dusk, and at night. There’s something in their song that’s indecipherable yet so comforting. It’s simple in a way, constant, natural. And it reminds us that time passes. It reminds us that summer is ending; that the time is ending when many of us, as children (and teachers), were on vacation, and hopefully had a taste of freedom, joy, and ease. And if we can only listen deeply enough⎼ we can’t stop time, but we can tune in to its rhythm, its beat. Listening to the crickets tunes our ears so we better hear the beat of all of life, and feel joy in it, feel the song in our bones, feel the heart of the world in our heart.
One worry I’ve had at times is that in the last moments of life, I would show great fear. And this would interfere in my saying goodbye to those I love. But that’s why we practice meditation and mindfulness, I think. And this fear⎼ it might mask something else, that feeling terror is what terrifies. At the end, the only way to not be terrified is to remove all masks and accept all moods and feelings. To accept who we are. To accept is to neither deny nor get lost in the mood, but just be real about it. It’s that simple and tremendous.
We can’t hold fear, death, at bay with anything. At the end, I think only honesty will do. The lonely quiet of sincerity. Simplicity. Appreciation for the sadness and beauty of things changing. And practice in perceiving the indefinable mystery in right now, so at the end, the mystery is there for us. So instead of being lost in fear, right now is here for us. Or so I feel, hope, and listen.
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