78 Zazen

Despite my ignorance and what I later discovered to be my mistakes both major and minor I found that I liked sitting. I did not know why and I could not explain why but I did. As I sat and experimented with sitting for those three months I continued to read and to reread my books and my manuals and I corresponded with John and with Billy about my experience. I wrote that I was experiencing bodilessness, a feeling I very much enjoyed, and I asked my friends if that was a desirable result.

Negative.

No, they both agreed, it was not.

No.

"We want balance," Billy said, "the integration and synthesis of both body and mind."

"Not two," I remembered from Suzuki.

I should sit with my eyes open, not closed, I also learned, because we are trying to wake up. Billy explained that it is because we are trying to wake up and to be aware and alert and to not space off that the Tibetans sit in well-lighted rooms decorated in bright colors—gold, blue, red, orange, yellow. Zazen also is done with eyes open, John informed me, but in a quiet, dimly lit room—gray, brown, black—austere, he said, and practitioners sit facing a wall to minimize distractions from looking within and studying the self. Immediately I stopped sitting with my eyes closed—but not without regret. For two months I had been sitting with my eyes closed and I had never fallen asleep. I liked it.

It was hard to give up.

Attachment.

When I began sitting with my eyes open I did not experience bodilessness.

That, too, I missed.

Attachment.

But both in darkness and in light I liked meditation. John reminded me that he had urged me to sit zazen with him and his wife one night in Reunion in 1975 and that when I had tried I had laughed.

Yes, I remembered.

I had been still so giddy with delight at whatever it was that had possessed me and shaken me and shown me heaven and god that our sitting together face to face—that was how we'd done it—in silent meditation had just struck me as quite comical, just plain funny, and I had laughed. I had just been glad—so very glad. Now twenty-five years later I had tried sitting again and I liked it very much.

Not doing.

"Meditation is good," John said. "But when I sit," he added, "I experience discomfort and the desperate, anxious, unending yearning of my mind to be somewhere else and to do something else, anything else, anywhere else but here. It is painful and requires effort. It's hard—at least for me—but it's good. I recommend it totally without reservation. Suzuki says that your true nature wants to sit and that sitting is the only way to satisfy your true nature. It's wisdom seeking wisdom. That feels right. I don't really want to sit but if I don't something is not satisfied."

Hmm.

That wasn't my experience and I wrote Billy that my sitting comforted me.

Oops.

"Beware of comfort," Billy warned.

I sat.

There was also the issue of the inner voice.

The thinker.

In July, Ruth's uncle was killed in an automobile accident. Her aunt suffered terrible injuries. In Independence we attended the funeral. Though even in meditation my interior monologue continued unabated, my thoughts and words endlessly arising and passing away, at the funeral I had nothing to say. In spite of my years of reading so-called "spiritual" books, death still left me speechless. The most I ever had to offer was a sad smile, a handshake, a hug.

All my words failed me.

I had grown even more curious about the inner voice. All of the masters and adepts, Castaneda, Trungpa, even Krishnamurti, seemed to agree that it was essential somehow to stop the interior monologue. When I was curious about something, I just asked people about it. I had done that all my life. While in Independence I inquired of my wife's youngest brother.

"Yes," Mickey said, "I am all too familiar with my inner voice."

Ah!

"What kinds of things does it say?" I asked.

I wondered.

"It tells me constantly what a lazy son of a bitch I am," he said, "and to get back to work!"