[Escaping from oneself]
Dear Donagh,
We have someone in the office who never stops talking about Zen. Every chance he gets he’s onto it. It’s having the opposite effect, it’s become a bit of a joke among the rest of the staff…. My brother is into meditation and I was asking him about Zen, but he said he didn't know much about it, that it wasn’t Catholic. I heard then that you have a Zen group in Tallaght. Which kinda surprised me. When I googled you I saw you weren’t as fanatical as our workmate. What's the secret? How can anyone be so enthusiastic about just sitting down doing nothing? Mike
Dear Mike,
Sorry about that buzz in your ear in the office. I can well imagine how annoying it must be. It is much more characteristic of Zen to say nothing about Zen. And rightly so. Zen is nothing in itself: it’s just sitting, doing nothing, as you say. If you look at the archive of this ‘Between Ourselves’ page, you’ll see that the only questions and responses on Zen, as far as I can see, were in 2010 and in 2019.
Your friend must be new to Zen. Try to indulge him for the moment. The fuss that he’s making is certain to die down. It’s a novelty for him. Who knows what kind of hope it’s offering him? - some vision of freedom, or fulfilment; in any case, some sort of lift. That’s the bait we all need if we are to take up something new. But that's all it is: bait. No one can live on bait alone. To change the metaphor, all that hot air will cool down. In the end, Zen leaves you back on the ground with nothing but yourself. That's the best place to be, though it seldom seems so at the time. I'm reminded of a poem by W.B. Yeats, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. Having reviewed all the stirring themes of his earlier poems, he wrote:
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
“How can someone be so enthusiastic about just sitting down doing nothing?” you ask. But let me ask: if I can be enthusiastic about my life only when I have some new interest, what does that say about the way I live? If I always have to have something new, what value do I set on what I am and have already? This way my life begins to look like serial escapism. Millions of people, in fact, sit down every day doing nothing – how else would you describe watching TV or aimlessly browsing the internet? In that case it is not even a new interest, it is floating like a dead body in the river. They are doing nothing, they are completely passive. But sitting in meditation (Zen or any other kind) is not passive. Yes, on the outside it looks like doing nothing, but a meditator is fully aware, fully alive. They are not drifting unconsciously through the hours, they are awake to the wonder of existence, moment by moment. Yes, even if their circumstances are dire, even if they are reduced to the foul rag and bone shop that Yeats experienced, they are not floating passively. That very place is “where all the ladders start.” It is not a dead end. They find enlightenment even there.
So, in regard to your friend, Mike: we never really know what the other person is onto. A non-moment could be the turning-point of one’s life. Better to surround him with friendship and otherwise let him be. I had a Viennese friend, a relative of Sigmund Freud, who told me, when I asked her about it, that the best advice on rearing a family is “to love ‘em like hell and leave ‘em alone.” She was diffident about the Freud connection, but she had learnt her own wisdom in the school of experience. It is probably good advice for nearly every occasion. She was a great spirit. She died a few years ago, but she would be greatly amused to know that I passed on her advice.
Donagh