I first met the Buddha when I was in my early thirties. I never really took an active interest in my life, instead it seemed to happen to me. I was pretty much doing what was expected of me, walking the road most travelled. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. Spirituality was foreign to me, something crazy people were involved with.
Somewhere in the mid-Sixties, I actually thought about being different and I can’t even define what that meant. I was living in the East Village in a huge, seven room apartment, with a bunch of older guys I had met, while being a page at NBC, a glorified usher for TV shows and backstage goings on. They were from all over the country, fairly intent on having a good time as their primary goal. I had grown up in Queens, NY and going to college and being successful was the only choice. I bumped into the wall of difference and felt confused.
I did not have emotional equipment necessary to question life choices of that magnitude and opted for being a good boy, leaving unsettling alternatives alone for the time being. I got myself in pretty deep, a career in broadcast advertising, a wife, two beautiful boys and a mortgage. One of the many things I’ve learned as I have clocked off the decades is that you can never anticipate what time will do to you, because there is simply no preparation for what you don’t know.
Right around the time the Buddha and I crossed paths for the first time, I stumbled into therapy, where I stayed for nearly ten years. I can look back at it now with a kind of knowing smile, but back then I was flayed by weekly revelations. I was not much of a reader and books still don’t call to me, which I’d never confuse with a desire to learn and know more. I had an idea that Buddhism would provide me with peace and an all knowing way of being. If you didn’t bother speaking to the Buddha and just looked at his face, you could think this guy figured it all out.
There was a bookstore, somewhere near Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth St in Manhattan and it was filled with weird people, absorbed by spiritual matters and I was the Martian, attache case in hand, looking for books on Buddhism. Like any religion or discipline, depending upon where you put the Big Guy, it is easy to be overwhelmed by dogma and ritual. Zen was a word thrown around quite a bit and still is. I am a Cliff Notes kind of guy and the tenets of Zen seemed incredibly simple to me.
As far as I could tell, the most important thing was to sit, just sit. Of course, there were rules about it, but I didn’t really give a shit. I lifted sentences and simple ideas, which worked for me. I don’t know why, but the way Zen looked at the riddles of life made a strange kind of sense to me. I have a feeling that in the beginning, following the Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree, he embraced the bare bones of his awakening and over time, layered more and more on to it.
One of the books referred to Zen as the infinite circle, meaning everything, absolutely everything is Zen, without exception. You can’t out run it, because you are surrounded by it. In a way, it makes you let go of whatever you are holding on to.
This guy was a prince, living in India around 2,600 years ago. He was never allowed to leave the palace and it wasn’t until he was around nineteen that he first left and he was completely unprepared for the amount of suffering he witnessed. His life’s work from that moment on was to try and understand the nature of this suffering and I love the guy for what he came to understand. To me, it is an unexplained miracle to find that there are a select number of people that history places perfectly where they belong, as if all of humanity has been waiting for them.
The Buddha came to realize that this suffering that shocked him so, was because all of us don’t understand we are here for a limited time. To truly embrace this idea of impermanence, lifts the yoke of suffering and it gives one’s life a whole new meaning. It’s like going to a chiropractor and getting a complete life adjustment. What becomes important is turned on its head by this revelation.
I also fell in love with the idea of dependent co-arising, which instantly sounds like some New Age bullshit, which it isn’t, actually having been proven by science. The basic idea is that everything effects everything, an interconnectedness that crosses all the boundaries of time and space. I want to give you a terrible example. The inhumane suffering of the little boys and girls, caged in detention centers around this country is our suffering and it is as wrong as wrong could possibly be.
Unfortunately, Zen gets terribly esoteric and people write endlessly about it. Not being the brightest bulb in the chandelier, I was attracted by my interpretation of its simplicity. After all is said and done, you don’t have to know 100 prayers by heart or the official reasons why you do what you do. You just have to sit.
I am not sure when I made sitting part of my obsessive compulsive morning routine, but it was sometime around thirty years ago, when I moved to northern, NM. I did some sitting while in NYC and that bookstore had scheduled practices, which I participated in. Before I left the City, I spent several summers at a farm house I rented in Honesdale, PA. On my weekends there, I’d get up before sunrise and walk out into the fields and sit facing the rising sun.
My practice really took hold when I moved out to Santa Fe. I had left my entire life behind me on the highway west and sitting became one of the pillars on which I built a new one. Toward the end of my stay out there, I was living in a wonderfully funky, old house and I made a small room, my sitting room, which I thought was very cool..
After all these years, I am a terrible sitter. Now, I sit for around 25 minutes and I have no idea why I picked that number. I just sit, trying to move as little as possible, breathing and thinking about whatever comes up and kind of letting it go. Sometimes, the time goes quickly and other times it is torturous. The few times I was thinking about writing something about this, the time shot right on by. I know it has changed my life, but I can’t tell you how, an obnoxious Zen like response.
I am gloriously happy I met the Buddha and I think he’d be OK with what I’m doing.