Recently in zen practice Category

People on Facebook have inviting their FB friends to list the top ten books that have had the greatest impact in our lives. Some people start naming big-name classics like Cervantes, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Joyce. This strikes me as rather uninteresting, but maybe I am just envious because I am not well-read in the classics. Others are surprisingly candid -- or perhaps, naive -- in listing some real crap, self-help junk, various pop-schlock titles. I guess I am somewhere between an intellectual and a moron; ignorant, but a snob.

Problem is, I can't bring myself to do this top ten list. I have been living 50+ years and reading for so long that I no longer remember very well the books that had a great impact at the time I read them, even where their impact was indeed great. The more recently read books tend to displace the old ones. So most of my top ten would be things from the past five years or so. All right, let's give it a try anyway:

(1) Nietszche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Made a huge impression on me when I was 16 years old, so it has to stay on the list. I may not have understood it deeply, but nevertheless.

(2) Juliet Schor - The Overworked American. I read it in the early 1990s and keep remembering it time and again, so it makes the list.

(3) Duke and Gross - America's Longest War. Greatly informed my thinking about the so-called War on Drugs, which I have been observing from the perspective of a judiciary employee for the past 20 years.

(4) Mathieu Ricard - Happiness. Picked up a copy while looking for something to do at an airport in December 2006. The timing was perfect. It actually changed my life for the better, permanently.

(5) Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma. I was already leaning in the direction of a vegetarian diet, but after reading this, I changed the way I eat.

(6) The Gateless Barrier, a/k/a The Gateless Gate. I was a student at a zendo for about two and a half years, studying with a teacher. Maybe some of it was bullshit. But we went through this koan collection, and I did a lot of sitting (still do hit the mat every day). I know the exercise had a profound effect.

(7) Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5. I never read it until recently -- a couple years ago. I think it's one of the finest novels I have ever read.

(8) Haruki Murakami - 1Q84. It isn't just this novel, but that it introduced me to this writer and I went on to read several more of his books. You talk about a work of fiction grabbing you in the first few pages. This one grabbed me and did not let go for the next 900+ pages. I don't know what it is about this guy. He sees the world in a weird way that is peculiar to him, and yet... universal? "Remember: there is always only one reality." Really?

(9) Don deLillo - Underground. The one that begins at the famous Dodgers-Giants game in 1959. Man, that was one fucking good book.

(10) Terry Eagleton - Why Marx Was Right. My father and I have a decades-long history of talking about politics, about which we generally agree, although I have moved to the left of him. He lent me this book, and it had an enormous impact. Hitherto, I had often said I would consider myself a socialist but for the fact that I had not read any Marx or Engels, much less Lenin or Trotsky. I went on to establish contact with some real, practicing Marxists. In a conversation with one of them -- a particularly feisty and erudite old bastard whom I'll call Fred -- he scoffed at Why Marx Was Right, saying Eagleton was a "Catholic Marxist," i.e., something of a joke. But this book got me started reading some of the works of Trotsky, Lenin, Marx, Engels, and finding out for myself what the political theory is. Combining that with readings of countless contemporary articles that use Marxist methods of analysis, attending some lectures, and observing world events unfold through my own eyes, my political education has advanced greatly in the past two or three years. I am a Marxist-Trotskyist. In this capitalist culture, much of what my generation has been taught about history and socialism is utter nonsense. I have developed a reasonable level of confidence in my ability to sort out the truth from the bullshit.

when you awaken at some ungodly hour
ease your way around your dreaming spouse

to sneak through the house like a thief
and put on your running shoes

and even the cats look at you
as though you've lost your mind:

you will ask
why am I doing this?
because.

because when you begin to run
down the street
your footsteps will echo
off the sleeping houses.

running, running we run
our thousands of feet
follow the road
towards Boston.

somewhere along mile 25
I understand this moment
as no different from any other.

devoid of content,
this very moment
is exactly emptiness.

we run before dawn
two pairs of feet trotting along
dark silent streets,
then up the mountain.

a few feet off the road
three deer
foraging in the woods

silhouetted in the dim cold
they look up for a moment
then ignore us

as we continue down the road
the horizon now swelling pink
through the bare trees.

I wrenched the holy fuck out of my lower back while getting into the car to drive my daughter to school last Friday morning. That simple act seems to have triggered it, but an accumulation of insults must have contributed. I had never had a back experience quite so bad in my 50-plus years. I could barely walk, and had to miss a couple days of work. I could not dress myself without assistance, and was only just able to maintain that essential, minimal autonomy and independence: lower myself onto the toilet to take a shit, and wipe my own ass.

The back is hard to ignore, being right in the center of the body, the hub of everything: arms, legs, head. For the first day or two or three, I tried to be tough. Pain? Fuck pain, I can deal with it. But after about four or five days of it, when you are stiffly shuffling around in your bathrobe, staring out the window at the rain falling from the quiet gray sky... then you understand how a person could get depressed.

I had planned to run a local 5K race Saturday morning, even indulging fantasies of winning my age group. Indeed, the guy who did win it is an acquaintance, and his pace was 2 seconds per mile slower than my last 5K, on August 14. There would have been a dramatic battle to the finish line! (I could have this, I would have that --- yeah, so go into a bar and brag about "could have" and see how many people you impress.) Instead, as runners were milling about the starting area, I was struggling just to get from bed to toilet, taking tiny baby steps, gasping and holding the walls for support.

Debilitating injury and pain get to us for any number of compelling reasons, but foremost among them is that such episodes are prefigurations of our eventual, inevitable death. Yeah you heard me: one of these days you are gonna go down and stay down, and your life will end. We should regard these illnesses and pains of our decaying bodies as opportunities to reflect on impermanence.

And yet there is a hilariously comical element mixed into this mess. A couple of times I burst out laughing at my predicament, stuck somewhere in the middle of a room, unable to stand still, unable to move forward. The vibrations from the laughter made my back hurt worse, of course, so I laughed all the harder -- erasing from my wife's mind any lingering doubt that I am crazy.

running

feet and ground
through the damp spring air
infused with honeysuckle

I signed up for a sesshin, or retreat, at a place called the Zen Mountain Monastery upstate: a week of lots and lots of sitting in a formal and disciplined monastic setting. I wanted to experience someplace other than the one zendo which I have attended exclusviely since I started practicing, and be an anonymous face in a large crowd. I also wanted to hear what the teachers had to say, after being deeply impressed with a couple of talks that I had read online. Two people I know who had trained at ZMM encouraged me to go. One of the founders, now deceased, is regarded as a major figure in western Zen -- John Daido Loori.

[An aside for readers not familiar with Zen as practiced by most Western lay people: the core of the practice is sitting, or zazen -- seated meditation. It's important to sit every day, and it is likewise important to do intensive practice as often as your schedule permits: that is, all-day sittings, or zazenkai, and multi-day sittings, which we call sesshin or retreats. During these extended sittings there is no talking, reading, or fooling around with phones or computers. There are periodic breaks (sometimes barely adequate) in the zazen schedule for things like meals and sleep. The idea is to keep practicing around the clock. Sesshin tends to sharpen your skills and, ultimately, make you more acutely aware of where you are and what you are doing. This is also known as being awake. It can be said that Zen is for those who would dare to wake up.]

So I drove up to Mount Tremper, NY, on a rainy Monday afternoon, and sesshin began that night. The next day at about two o'clock in the afternoon I packed my bags and walked, deciding that this was not a fruitful use of my time right about now.

The place had about it a slight fragrance of psychopathy mingled with the incense.

My mattress was seriously fucked up, and made my back hurt. The ratio of showers to people was too low to expect more than one shower over the six days. The schedule was 3:55 a.m. rise, and lights out at 9:30, with a number of short breaks and only one one-hour break for all your rest and exercise. Breakfast and lunch were taken as formal oryoki, an extremely elaborate ritual involving lots of chanting and drumming and bells, folding and unfolding cloths and arranging bowls and utensils in a very particular way.

Maybe I gave up prematurely. I was uncomfortable and got but little sleep my one night there, and sleep deprivation has a pronounced negative effect on my mood (so it is for everyone, but I seem to do worse than most). My lower back ached, although not bad enough to be a crisis. There came a point in the oryoki ritual in which you put a bit of rice on the handle end of your little wooden spatula as an offering to your supernatural imaginary friend the Hungry Ghost. That's when I realized this was not for me. I deliberated over the next hour or so to give myself a chance to reconsider, but that was pretty much the turning point in which I said fuck this.

If this sesshin regime were a prison, Amnesty International would have something to say about the inadequate opportunities for sleep, exercise, exposure to the outdoors, and bathing. But it is by no means a prison. You go in on a purely voluntary basis for a limited time -- and although it is discouraged, you can get up and leave, as I did.

I packed my gear and took it out to the car as people were assembling in the zendo for the next round of sitting, following lunch. Drove down the driveway and found there was a gate that I was going to have to open in order to get out. When I got out of the car, I saw one of the monks walking towards me, and understood that I was going to have to speak to her. I had half-tried to tell myself, prior to escaping, that walking out and hitting the highway was going to be a satisfying act of self-liberation. But when I realized I was going to have to explain myself to someone, I felt a sheet of emotion extending from somewhere around waist level to above my eyes. She asked whether something had happened. I explained as best I could that this just was not for me, not now. She said, why did you come? I knew the question was not rhetorical. She wanted me to consider why I had come in the first place. Unable to recall any reason, I said it sounded like a good idea at the time. She tried gently to dissuade me from leaving, suggesting that I might try hanging around for the afternoon, talking to one of the teachers. I pictured myself re-entering the building with my baggage and re-installing myself in the room, and found the image intolerable. If she had said, come on, I will help you get your stuff back inside, it might have been a closer contest. I told her, as respectfully and tactfully as I could, the same things I just said here. I am attached to my bourgeois lifestyle, and have trouble tolerating a week with scarcely a shower and a bed so uncomfortable that it will take my back days to recover once I get home. She said, we could do something about the bed. I said, I am a wordly and unspiritual sort of dude for whom offering blobs of rice to supernatural beings is not the way I want to spend time that I could otherwise be with my wife and kids and cats. I said I understood that walking away from the commitment to stay till the end was not approved of, and could accept it if I was banned for life. She was perfectly gracious about it, and said on the contrary, I was welcome to come back and try again any time.

I was practically in tears as I drove away, because leaving was an anguishing decision, and I felt -- rightly or not -- a certain shame and humiliation from the failure. It took the rest of the week to process and get over it.

It isn't necessary to justify myself, but I am gonna do it anyway and state for the record that I am not a one who typically quits when faced with adversity or difficulty. I have done week-long sesshin a couple times before, with schedules that were perhaps not as grueling as this one, but certainly not leisurely -- and walking out was never under serious consideration. I have kept other tough commitments in this life, like training hard for 20 weeks to run a New York Marathon at a Boston-qualifying pace even when the last 10 kilometers were brutal.

So what happened here? I think this experience can be seen as analogous to a computer crashing under excessive load. Too many hats: father; stepfather; husband; computer programmer; professional court interpreter; distance runner; single-payer healthcare activist; ....Zen monk? Crash!

There is only so much you can do at a given point in your life. You can stretch the container pretty damn far, but we all must reach a limit at some point; then you have to choose between this and that, not both. Far be it from me to find fault with this style of practice. I might even go back and try it again some day, as the monk kindly suggested that I could. For now I belong on my mat at home and zendo, and in my supremely comfortable bed with wife and purring cats.

As someone who struggled intermittently with sleep problems for decades and ultimately beat them, I am pleased to share what I consider the secrets of my success. None of this can be proven objectively; none of this is science; all of this is subjective and anecdotal. But it's consistent with both science and common sense.
I assume you're already familiar with the conventional wisdom: take it easy on the caffeine; don't eat heavily too soon before going to bed; don't work out hard too soon before going to bed; and so on. All that is fine. But here's what seems to be working brilliantly for me.

Step one: clean house. Everything else can almost be considered a subset of this overarching principle. By house-cleaning, I refer metaphorically to getting one's personal shit in order. This may seem self-evident at first glance. But this sort of mental-personal hygiene is forever a work in progress, and many of us are wandering around in various degrees of denial and delusion, so it bears a closer look. Hate your job? Deal with it. Hate your spouse? Deal with it. Need a shrink? Get one. Need to change shrinks? Do it.

Next, be very careful with alcohol. Even though I've always been high-functioning, I used to drink abusively most weekends of my life, thinking of it as a form of recreation. A few years ago I realized I had had enough, and abruptly quit binge-drinking. Few things disrupt sleep as cruelly as alcohol, and it gets worse as you get older. Moreover, the effects of boozing are more subtle, pernicious and persistent than we might think. You might be smashed on Saturday night and think that sin should be in the past on Wednesday, when you can't sleep. Not so. Moreover, a penchant for getting hammered usually points to some underlying issue that has to be addressed: see step one above. I am still in the process of examining my own story, but getting to sleep is no longer an issue.

Next: exercise. Seriously burn some major calories doing hard cardiovascular exercise several times a week. The benefits are amply documented, and getting more so all the time. Don't make excuses. Do it, and learn to love it. It's good to lie down at night with a body that is really, legitimately tired, not just an exhausted body and a mind buzzing with all of life's bullshit.

Next: sit. That's the simple, unpretentious term many meditators like to use for what they practice. We call it sitting because it really is just sitting. There are many different meditation techniques, but the form I favor is arguably not meditation at all because there is no external object of concentration, no mantra, no effort to stop thinking and attain some pure state of single-pointed concentration. Sit up straight -- on a cushion, or a kneeling bench, or even a chair -- eyes open, looking down at about a 45 degree angle, and inhale and exhale. It's good to set a timer so you don't have to worry about the clock. Pay attention to what you're doing: breathing in and out, receiving sensory input, thinking thoughts. Keep returning your attention to the experience of right now. The attention will wander -- will crawl away like a turtle, or fly off like a bird. No problem, just keep coming back, time and again. Don't worry about goals and objectives. Just sit. As Matthieu Ricard puts it with elegant understatement in one of his books, the benefits of meditating for 15 minutes a day far outweigh the scheduling difficulties. And by the way, the state of pure concentration -- moments of astonishing clarity and calm -- will eventually begin to happen from time to time. But not as a result of chasing after it.

Next: when it's time for sleep, do not try. I can't emphasize this enough. Stop trying to go to sleep. What could be more ridiculous, and self-defeating? There is no hurry. I have found it far more effective to just lie there doing nothing than to worry about the clock. Just lie down and let it happen.

Or not. The final point here is that you may do all this stuff with great diligence, and still have occasional difficulties getting to sleep and/or staying there. Maybe a bit too much coffee, or anxiety, or food, or some combination of these -- whatever. When this happens, it happens. Do not worry about it. After all, what good does it do?

I had the privilege of running the 2009 New York Marathon on Sunday, November 1. This was my second marathon; the first was Philadelphia in 2008. I trained for 20 weeks using a program from runningplanet.com specifically designed for a 3:40:00 marathon. In the final week of training I decided to reset my goal to 3:35:59, which qualifies a male in my 50-something age bracket for the prestigious Boston Marathon.

The NY Marathon is a logistical tour de force, with its 40,000-plus runners. Organizers clearly went to great lengths to keep everything moving and avoid excess congestion. Thus the start was divided into three waves, and these in turn were further partitioned into separate routes that only merged several miles later, where the streets were wider and people were naturally spread out more than at the start.

The streets were lined with hordes of cheering people. The atmosphere was highly charged, and despite the fact that I knew better, and even as I knew what I was doing, I committed the classic marathoner's mistake known as going out too fast. Instead of running around 8:14 per mile, my pace over the first 10K was 7:53.

Gradually I calmed down and ran the middle third of the race at a more reasonable pace. But you can't change the past, and by mile 18 I knew I was going to have to pay for my earlier lack of discipline. I had taped to my left wrist a timetable showing how much time had to have elapsed at each mile if I was to attain my goal time, and from consulting it I knew I was ahead of the pace throughout the course. But by mile 20 I was fading and the margin of error was getting slimmer. I concluded that I had nothing left, therefore nothing to lose. I would ask myself, can you stand another six miles of this? Yes I can. At five miles to go: can you stand another five? Yes I can. And so on.

The split times over the last six tell a tale of alternately fading, then fighting back. Mile 20, 8:22 -- too slow. Mile 21, 8:28 -- even slower! Mile 22, 8:12 -- excellent, two seconds ahead of the goal pace. Mile 23, 8:10 -- great. Mile 24 which is largely uphill, 8:49 -- despair! Mile 25, 8:04 -- heroic. Mile 26, 8:22 -- too slow, but we're almost home. For the last 0.2 I was running at an 8:35 pace -- definitely fading fast.

When at long last the great sign that said Finish came into view, I was so spent that it took me a couple of beats to comprehend what it meant. I crossed the finish line and stopped my watch at 3:34:44: success.

Weaving and unsteady on my feet, I was accosted by a volunteer who led me to the medical tent, where I ended up lying on a cot recovering for about 25 minutes. On the adjacent cot was a guy named John from New Zealand, apparently in his 40s, who had also nailed his BQ (Boston qualifier) at 3:17 -- and who had likewise spent everything he had and then some, and landed in the medical tent like me. In a shared state of total exhaustion and elation, we had a wonderful conversation about the nature of this amazing thing known as marathon running. It was a highlight of the whole experience.

During this conversation with John I had an insight: a marathon is at once both a communal, public event -- a grand party, an orgy of thousands running through the streets! -- and at the same time, as intensely personal and intimate an experience as you can have. It is absolutely solitary, but in a way that is neither good or bad. You drop down into ever deeper realms of your own consciousness and find out about who you really are. Think ten years of psychotherapy compressed into a few hours. Or, for you Zen practitioners, think of a week sesshin crammed into a single morning. No wonder the marathon game isn't for everyone. I believe that many marathon runners are motivated by nothing other than a search for the Truth. We intuitively understand what Master Bassui teaches: the Great Question cannot be resolved by the discursive mind.

Second-guessing myself, I speculate that I could well have attained the same result or better if I had run a more disciplined, strategic race. It would have been more elegant if I had conserved energy in the first half and had a powerful finish, running the last miles faster, not slower, than any of the preceding. But as experiences go, what actually did happen cannot be surpassed. It was a marvelous adventure.

This afternoon I was doing speed work on a treadmill as part of my training for the New York Marathon on November 1. I am preparing to run the 26.2 mile course in 3 hours and 40 minutes, or 8:23 per mile, and this is the 16th of 20 weeks of training. Today's assignment, according to the program I am using, was to run seven one-mile repeats at 7:28 per mile, alternating with .25-mile periods of recovery at an easy pace, then finishing heroically with a final quarter mile at nearly full pace.

The magnificent thing about this program is that it works. It gets gradually more demanding, calling on you to run farther and farther, run fast for progressively longer periods, run uphill for miles at a stretch, and so forth. And you do it. How? With your feet, one step at a time. Left right left right left right. At the end of week 17 there is a 23-mile run, then you taper off into a more merciful and gentle regime designed to let you recover from that exertion while staying well tuned until race day.

Cranking out the one-mile repeats on the treadmill I experience a remarkable sensation of freedom and power. Sure, it's hard work, but this body -- miraculously -- rises to the occasion and not only does it, but does with confidence and relative ease. When the third and fourth repeats feel lighter and easier than the first and second, it seems as though one is getting stronger even while expending energy.

Today I had a weird and moving experience while banging out the last quarter mile at something close to as fast as possible. As I heard my feet drumming and felt my lungs working, there came to mind an image of a virtuoso pianist performing the closing measures of some fabulous show piece, perhaps Franz Liszt. The pianist dressed in formal concert attire, hands flying everywhere, her whole being absorbed in concentration, the music filling the darkened hall like thunder, the audience absolutely entranced. Nobody even thinks a thought, there is nothing other than music. I had the feeling that there was no difference whatsoever between that and this, this and that. Tears came to my eyes.

And the music was over. I pressed the "Cool Down" button, finished sweating for a few quiet minutes, then went and took a shower.

Ask the cat.

Ride the train towards the suburbs
in the late afternoon.
Sit by the window looking out
into the rainy dusk:
parking lots and shabby buildings,
trees in the distance
blending into fog.

Inside, the train's flourescent light is harsh
Outside it is subtle
dying a quiet, elegant death.

Is there any contrast?

Both inside and out
belong to the undifferentiated whole

Inside and out
form a single reality --
incontrovertible, flawless.

These cats
one black and white,
one orange and white
come in the night to sleep in our bed.
warm and furry beyond reason
they slither under the covers in cold weather

Or install themselves above our heads
as if to coronate us
there to purr in all their regal magnificence
and sleep untroubled like gods.

Until they get hungry!
then they start knocking
shit off the dressers, upending lamps
they trash the place like vandals
and claw our flesh without mercy.

goddamnit, cats! all right. you win.
we will go downstairs to the kitchen
and eat some cat food.

I spent a few minutes googling around for online literature -- is that an oxymoron? -- on the subject of Zen and running. Though it surely exists, I found but little. Mostly I found the word Zen misused, as so frequently happens, as a synonym for bliss. According to what I have learned about Zen (admittedly, not much), the heart of the practice is meditation, and meditation in turn is fundamentally not so much about vegging out, escape, self-improvement, or even stress reduction, but rather the practice of sitting with what is. Yes, there are occasional moments of what I call shocking clarity and calm. Perhaps for the experienced, skilled meditator these moments occur more often and for longer periods -- ask me in 20 years and I will tell you. But for the most part, it's about disciplined repetition. Inhaling and exhaling. The attention wandering off, and coming back, wandering off and coming back again. Again and again, minute after minute, day after day, sitting with what is: that dog yapping, a pain in your back, some car passing by in the distance, thoughts swimming around in your head, the movement of the breath. Stilling the mind and ever so gradually getting acquainted with reality.

So it is for the runner. While training for a marathon I have been struck by the strange and fascinating comparison of running and zazen. At first glance they seem utterly different from each other, located at the opposite extremes of activity and inactivity: running your ass off for miles, versus sitting absolutely still staring at the paint for 30 minutes. But both are disciplined repetition; both involve paying attention and then wandering off. Paying attention: feet and ground. Breathing in and out. The stride. The breath. The surroundings. Monitoring body and mind. Feet and ground. Breathing in and out. Then wandering off: following thoughts. Reviewing and editing the past, scripting the future, having a grand old time. Then coming back to what is: feet and ground. Left right left right.... One foot after another, mile after mile: this is reality not delusion.

Many runners are fond of running with digital audio players and the like. I don't believe in that. Yes I have enjoyed using a radio or iPod on occasion. But for serious running I suggest we should eschew such distractions. It's not about entertainment, or trying to make the running something other than what it is, or making it somehow more palatable, or less boring. No. Embrace the boredom, if that's what it is. It's about paying attention to feet and ground.

The Sandokai by Master Shitou says:

You could study this text for years and still keep learning more about it. I wouldn't presume to explain what it means. But! (You saw that but coming.) But for me, running is more than just running. It is, in fact, just running. I am convinced that all those who ever put on a running shoe experience this truth whether they realize it or not.

Distance running and zazen: two activities some might call weird, each a wonderful complement and support to the other.

Update

Fast forward to nearly two years later. I am now 52 instead of 50, still sitting every day, and running considerably faster than when I posted the above. I have no means of proving that the practice of sitting has made me a better runner than I would otherwise be. Life is not a controlled experiment: if you do this, you can only speculate as to what would have happened if you'd done that instead. Still, there is little doubt that the sitting practice enriches one's life. It teaches you to pay attention to what is happening rather than just being dragged around by it. This in turn serves you well when you need discipline, self-control, and the ability to tolerate a certain amount of pain and/or exhaustion in an equanimous, non-reactive way. Skills such as these are essential to runners who push themselves to achieve their goals.

I have been a serious lay practioner of Zen for not quite two years -- not very long, I grant you. I originally got into it around the time of other profound changes -- moving out of an unsatisfactory marriage after 13 years, quitting the habit of abusing alcohol, feeling absolutely marvelous for the first time in years. I had long had the vague idea that some sort of meditation practice would be beneficial, so I visited a zendo of the Soto/Rinzai lineage, and adhered to it immediately. I attend the zendo regularly, and meet with my teacher privately every week -- daisan, as it's called. I study koans. I sit every day, and participate in extended sittings several times a year -- i.e., doing little other than meditating all day, all weekend, or all week. This is what serious practitioners do.

Why do this? I don't know. There is much that I find appealing in Buddhist thought generally, and in Zen Buddhism in particular. The basic ideas -- such as impermanence, the ubiquity of human suffering and its causes -- make sense to my rational mind. And I am convinced -- as it is well established -- that meditation itself provides meaningful benefits to mental and physical health.

On a more intuitive, visceral level, I am powerfully drawn to the idea that all the wisdom you will ever need is already within you. You have only to still what Master Lin-chi calls the ceaselessly seeking mind -- methodically, patiently, relentlessly -- to come to an understanding of nothing less than the essential nature of reality. If you think about it -- no, if you contemplate it -- you have to say, of course! How can it be otherwise?

Wait -- says who? Mister Buddha, the dude credited with launching the whole program? A multi-thousand year succession of masters and disciples and adherents? So? What if they are nuts? What if they are full of shit? Can anyone prove this stuff to be true in any credible, objective way? No, I think not. This is where the F-word comes into play: faith. Some call it trust. Whatever you call it, I sometimes have a big problem with it

This is an example of what they call Great Doubt and it is very much part of the program, according to what I have been taught. Doubt is encouraged. Doubt is your friend. The Buddha said, don't take my word for it. See for yourself. But it's still doubt and can be disconcerting, disquieting, distressing -- all kinds of dis-words.

Do you say, you are crashing and burning because you trying to approach rationally something that works below the level of rational mind? Maybe so. But rational mind is something we need to carry around with us to function and survive, and for the most part it's a good and helpful thing. Common sense -- prudence, if you will -- urges caution before investing decades of your life and incalculable amounts of energy and sacrifice in something this weird. Sometimes when I listen to one of the teachers speaking about such things as Zen and Reality and the One Absolute Truth, my inner voice tells me I might as well be listening to the demented ramblings of a lunatic. One of these teachers has said that Zen is and always will be a minority practice because it is such hard work. Gee, could it be that it's a minority practice because it's crazy, and most ordinary unenlightened dumbass people are too sensible for it?

In my great arrogance and psychospiritual immaturity, I have other problems with this Zen stuff. I am about as unspiritual as a person can be. You might even say anti-spiritual. For this devout atheist, the very word spiritual often sounds uncomfortably like agnostic code for religious. I'm all for bowing to people, but I think bowing to statues is silly, and do it only to go along with the crowd.

At a weekend sesshin just the other day my samu task was to clean the bathroom. As I was dilligently wiping the mirror my unmindful mind suddenly noticed something absurd. Here we are, a group of some 40 more or less privileged, educated white people from New York City, and we are paying to sweep floors, wash dishes and take out the garbage. What do you suppose people who actually clean bathrooms for a living would think? It is a ridiculously pretentious and comical affectation.

Sometimes I wonder what the hell I am doing here, and entertain fantasies of rising from the mat in the middle of a sitting period and walking out of the zendo, never to return.

But I don't. Instead I sit when it's time to sit, walk when it's time to walk, chant when it's time to chant, eat when it's time to eat. And when Sensei gave a talk this past weekend about how we were at sesshin to realize Nothing, the tears started coming out of my eyes and would not stop. Go figure.

For over 20 years I have been running for recreation and fitness, anywhere from about .8 to three or four times a week for distances of 4 to 6 miles. I have rarely been concerned about performance or proving anything. I was in it for fun and fitness. Suddenly, at age 50, I am signed up for the Philadelphia Marathon on November 23, 2008, and training seriously. How did this happen?

The influence of a running-fanatic friend was a factor. He encouraged me to try a half-marathon organized by the New York Road Runners back in January. This was the longest distance I had ever run and I was not properly trained for it. I was sore as hell for days afterwards, but I loved it. Five thousand pairs of feet trotting through the cold air of Central Park, a kin-hin line writ extremely large. I decided I would meet the NYYR requirement for entry into the New York Marathon in 2009 by running in at least nine races in 2008, and thus open the option of doing a marathon.

Then my running friend got into my head again: Why don't you do Philadelphia in the fall? It's open to anyone who pays the registration fee. I thought this over for a couple weeks, fretting over the difficulty of fitting training into an already busy life. Then just said fuck it, hit the website and did the deed.

Now I am embarked on a formal training program (from the Running Planet) that prepares you to complete a marathon in four hours. I felt irrationally attached to the four hour number even before arriving at it rationally. It's a nice round figure, and four hours of continuous running is quite enough, thank you, so let's get it over with. It's a fortunate coincidence that my running history is such that the four hour goal does appear to be reasonable and attainable. So I am going at it five or six days a week, getting up before dawn to trod the pavement and run around Liberty State Park as the sun comes up, hitting the treadmill at work, exerting myself like never before in my life.

Why do this? I have long been vaguely curious about the experience of completing a marathon and thought it might be interesting to try it some day and find out if I could do it. Then I noticed I was 50 years old. Now seems like a pretty good time to get started, rather than waiting until 60 or 70.

Yes, but that's doesn't answer the question: why do this? I read some place that there are as many reasons as there are runners, but that's another evasion.

Am I trying to outrun the grim reaper? Well, no, I fully expect to die. But first I would like to run a marathon.

But why? Am I trying to prove that I am disciplined and tough? Maybe a little. I don't think I need to prove that I am fit, it's a pretty simple and uncontroversial fact. But I will rather enjoy showing my medal to people. I guess that would be about ego gratification.

Why? Why go to so much trouble for ego gratification, or whatever it is? I don't know. Yesterday I was in Urban Athletics buying gear, and had a chat with one of the co-owners. When I raised this question with him, he simply said, cross the finish line and you'll know why.

I am reminded of something my Zen teacher once said to me: Ultimate truth cannot be known. But it can be experienced. Perhaps Jerry from Urban Athletics was saying the same thing.

Update: A few days later, Sensei was not impressed when I told him this story about the above remark from the guy at Urban Athletics. Ever the consummate Zen dude, he said: why ask why?

I had the honor of turning 50 the other day. My girlfriend (not quite 42 years old) generously hosted a back yard party at her house. There were about 25 delightful people, flawless spring weather, splendid food and drink. Had I been invited to say a few words to mark the occasion, I would have said something like the following.

I have no scruples about making a big deal out of my 50th birthday. If multiples of ten are noteworthy, multiples of 50 are huge. Living 50 years is an accomplishment one usually does not repeat. It's a good time to take a look at one's life and notice how it is unfolding, developing, changing, and to savor the pleasures of getting older.

When you get old enough, your past becomes so long that it can be considered history. When I turned ten the year was 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated a couple weeks before, and cities were burning. Robert F. Kennedy was to be assassinated in June, as Hillary Clinton so tastefully reminded us the other day. The United States was mired in a catastrophic imperial misadventure in Viet Nam, where what is known as the Tet Offensive was in full swing. The Pentagon and the CIA were in a power struggle over lying to the American public about enemy troop strength. Grim and bloody news of the war came to us daily through radio, television and print media. Many young people were rebelling and doing a lot of drugs. I was in fourth grade and my friends and I would ride around freely on our bicycles with neither supervision nor helmets.

At 20 I was a music student, working diligently and with determination to become a classical guitarist. Remember the Jimmy Carter administration?

At 30 I was a fairly accomplished classical guitarist and quit the business in favor of "real" full time employment. Late Reagan era, Bush senior about to ascend to the throne.

At 40 I was well established in a reasonably honorable and well-paying career, a homeowner, married, no kids. The Clinton years.

At 50 I am in the same job, the divorce very nearly a done deal, my daughter recently turned five, the house about to be sold (profitably, housing collapse notwithstanding). I live peacefully and contentedly in good health with two superb cats, and things have never been better. I am immensely grateful for my good fortune. Meanwhile, as Barack Obama prepares to defeat John McCain in the fall, the human race has probably never been in greater peril. Will my daughter's planet be inhabitable when she is approaching fifty?

* * *

In our society a lot of us have a troubled and complicated relationship with aging. We lie about our age, or we snicker and chuckle and joke about it. "You look much yonger than fifty" is considered a high compliment. I can't help but think that underlying that attitude is fear of nothing other than death. We grasp and cling to life and run like hell from death, we generally avoid thinking about the inevitable extinction of our selves and our loved ones -- until it's too late. Life is replete with unspeakable suffering, and then, in the best case scenario, you get old age, sickness and death for your trouble. That being the case, what -- if any -- is the purpose, value, meaning of anything? Is "I don't know" a satisfactory answer? Does it matter?

I am convinced that the time to face the large questions is now, when you can still reasonably expect to have a couple decades to work on it, not when you're in the hospice with three days to live. And the most important way to work on this little side project is to stare at the wall every day without fail. If I have to confess to having a goal or objective in practicing Zen, it is this: keep stilling the scattered, chattering mind and use the tools Zen provides to help us face facts. When it's time to go, be prepared. In the meantime, enjoy living life instead of worrying about losing it.

The wisdom that he who knows he has enough is rich dates back at least as far as Laozi, a/k/a Lao Tsu. Countless studies have since established that material prosperity does not equal happiness. And while it is one thing to nod your head and say yes I agree with this proposition, it is quite another to acquire direct knowledge of it through experience.

I have had the good fortune to suffer enough of an economic reversal to be able to learn about having less money, while at the same time not having my essential economic security -- food, shelter -- seriously threatened. And I am pleased to report that you can be happier with less money in your pocket. Having bills come due with my checking account balance running as low as $124 is inconvenient, but it is little more than an inconvenience. Again, especially when one is still gainfully employed and can expect some relief at the next paycheck, within a couple weeks at most. One comes to appreciate that other aspects of life truly are more valuable and important than your checking account balance. Indeed, having that balance plunge and not caring is immensely liberating.

One also learns something about fear and anxiety. I stand in the very situation that terrified me couple of years ago when it was an abstract possibility: having to make do with less, paying a hefty child support obligation while also maintaining my own household in an area where the cost of living is high. And yet here I am, and not only is it OK, it's a good deal better than OK.

I am reminded of something my teacher once said, à propos of anxieties that come up during zazen: we should be grateful for them, because we often discover that the thorny problem we were so worried about is not thorny, or if it is, the thorns are not as dangerous as we thought. The logic is rather subtle -- why does that mean we should be grateful? I suppose the reasoning is that you should be grateful for the teaching that eventually comes out of those anxieties that arise while you are studying the paint on the wall.

So it is with having less money than you previously did. I like to joke that if I had a more abundant money supply, I would permit myself two self-indulgences. One is that I would buy a great wheel of high quality parmesan cheese, far more than I need. This would be for pure greed and amusement. I think it would be a kick to have that much cheese in the house. I would give away big hunks of it. The other eccentricity I would indulge in is reading glasses. I would buy perhaps a thousand inexpensive pairs and scatter them everywhere: every surface of every room, every pocket of every garment. That's because I frequently misplace them. The reading glasses market is highly volatile in my household, not suitable for the risk-averse. My reading glasses portfolio can gain and lose large percentages of its value in a single afternoon. I start with two, then I have seven, then one. I would insulate myself against those shocks by owning a large reserve -- very large.

So there you have it. Not having a lot of cash to spare is not bad. If I had more, the only things I would change are my parmesan cheese and reading glasses inventories. But I don't, and am quite happy to buy these items in modest quantities.

The other day one of the teachers in our zendo gave a talk in which she likened the practice of zen to classical ballet: one of the most painfully demanding of disciplines. Dancers must show up for a 90 minute class every single day without fail, no matter how experienced and accomplished they are or think they are. Always showing up, always striving, tuning, preparing for the stage -- that's what it's about. So it is with the Zen practitioner. You show up at the zendo for formal zazen as often as you possibly can, regardless of whether you feel like it or whether it's convenient. Formal zazen is essential, a necessity. LIkewise, extended sittings such a as zazenkai and sesshin are not optional add-ons. They are what you do when you're a Zen practitioner.

This idea was reinforced by a scene that I recently saw in an episode from the fifth season of the venerable HBO series The Wire. During a prison visit, the incarcerated father admonishes his son to apply himself with greater diligence to his work in the drug trade. Either you real or you ain't, he says. Irony notwithstanding, this paternal advice underscores a valid point. The teacher's talk was evidently aimed at students who she thought needed to hear it. She might as well have said, either you real or you ain't.

I was reminded of something my family has said about me over the years: you are a fanatic, an addictive personality. When you set your mind to something, you go at it relentlessly, obsessively. I have always tended to think, well, ok. When they suggested that going away for a week-long sesshin last summer was an example of my fanaticism, I figured, whatever. Now I am not so sure. Sesshin is what zen practitioners do. Why do this at all unless you're serious? Either you real or you ain't.

Update

Looking at the above three months later, I see the fallacy in the argument "I am not a fanatic; sesshin is what Zen practitioners do." Sitting in meditation several hours a day for a week is extreme -- fanatical, even. Dedicated Zen practitioners are fanatics.

There was a good piece on NPR this morning about Martin Luther King's last speech, in which he said he was not concerned about longevity because he had been to the mountaintop and looked over. Just the night before I had been pondering the koan from which the phrase "All is vast and boundless" is taken. While listening to King's speaking voice coming out of the radio in my kitchen 40 years after the fact, it occurred to me that King himself must have realized that all is vast and boundless. It doesn't matter what you call it.

Rising from the mat
I go into the kitchen
to prepare some tea.

The avocado
you left here the other day
is perfectly ripe.

During Ango we Zen students studied the Ten Essential Precepts, and were encouraged to make an extra effort to follow one or two of our choosing. I was drawn towards number six: not talking about others�?? faults -- to accept others as they are. For years I have been increasingly uncomfortable whenever I hear myself speaking about the faults of someone who is not in the room, and indeed have even made a modicum of effort to avoid it. I thought, let me not talk shit about anyone for a month.

That quickly proved to be harder than I thought, as I discovered that bashing people is a staple of our conversational diet, at least in my world. I think A and B speak ill of C in a misguided effort to strengthen the bond between them. We are cool, he's a jerk. Misguided, because of course criticizing and gossiping about C strengthens nothing.

With heightened awareness, I learned to see it coming just as surely and inexorably as a train coming down the track -- an other-bashing on its way out of my mouth. Sometimes I found I could re-phrase and spin a thought away from judgement and closer to objectivity. Thus, instead of "the guy who installed the windows in my apartment is an idiot," perhaps "I am dissatisfied with the workmanship of the guy who installed my windows."

Still, a month was unrealistic, so I made the goal more modest: let me not talk about another's faults for one day. I go into work and within a couple minutes someone comes up to me with a piece of paper with some names on it and says, this guy is an idiot. Yeah. I say, and that one -- indicating another name -- isn't the sharpest tool either. Boom, just like that. Why? It wasn't even true. The guy on whom I was casting aspersions is actually perfectly competent and decent. I think I had once seen him turn in a performance that I found underwhelming, so I participated in the aspersion-casting. Try again tomorrow.

The following day a group of us was gathered around a table on which was a newspaper with a photograph of George W. Bush. He is such a piece of shit, I sighed to no one in particular. Why? What's my point? Everyone already knows my politics, and furthermore, knows the President is a piece of shit. Perhaps the photo caught me unprepared. See how hard this is?

In the ensuing days I think I did make it through an entire day, unless I spoke ill of someone unawares. In any case, the exercise was illuminating.

During the last few days of Ango I had some fun with another of the Precepts, Number Nine: not being angry �??- to see things as they are and not as they should be. One of the teachers at our zendo gave a talk in which she said, when you are displeased with things because they are not as you want them to be, take your attention -- and with a sound effect like a creaking, recalcitrant old machine, she made a gesture of hauling something from over to one side to straight ahead of her -- and drag it over to what is rather than what ought to be.

I discovered that just a little effort in this regard yields interesting results. I was leaving my apartment for work, running late as always, when I decided to take out the garbage. As I removed the container from under the sink, splat goes a little blob of garbage onto the floor. Wet tea leaves and such, a nice little mess. The immediate reaction was: you incompetent fucking moron. Then I thought, ah HA! There ought not to be a pile of garbage on my floor, I ought to be sure-handed, nimble, mindful, not a klutz. Yes, but there is garbage on the floor. Clean it up and go to work. End of story.

It's easy with petty things like the garbage incident. But you have to begin to train yourself somewhere. The next opportunity posed a greater challenge: have a phone conversation about something delicate with my estranged wife without having it erupt into warfare, in the all too familiar old dynamic. She came out with a couple of rhetorical flourishes that one might consider provocative, but I managed to stand my ground without being drawn into combat.

It's satisfying and fun to practice not acting like a dick.

I make a remark to my teacher and he says, you should write this stuff down. You don't have to tell me twice, for I love to write stuff down. So here is the first of what I expect will be a series of observations about the practice of Zen.

It is said that Zen is above all a practice, not a theory or philosophy. Experiential, not academic. And therefore one is supposed to do it rather than talk about it. And yet here I am talking about it, and planning to continue to do so. Oops.

OK, enough talk for now.