It’s an Art (Says the Old Fart)

The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young.  Sounds True.  265 pp.  $13.89.  *****

As Shinzen Young himself says in one of the later chapters, Zen teachers are known for under-explaining meditation, vipassana teachers for over-explaining.  It’s as if vipassana teachers want to tell you everything that might possibly happen, so you never have a moment that makes you uncomfortable, while Zen teachers tell you nothing, throw you in the water and say, Swim!  They go into enormous detail describing the posture, then say almost nothing about the mind.[1]  And as you walk out the door, they say, by the way, this is it, there’s no advanced practice, no future instruction, just sit for the rest of your life.  Now get the hell out of here.

But when you try it for a while and come timidly creeping back to ask a question, they fill in the gaps.  I vividly remember the first time I went to my teacher, during sesshin, and told her I was experiencing extreme anxiety (on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, when absolutely nothing was happening; what the hell was there to be anxious about?).  She said, “Where is that feeling in your body?”  And I thought, my God, this is a strange practice.

This whole book is meditation instruction.  It says things about meditation I’ve never heard anyone else say (perhaps because I mostly read Zen books).  In a way, Young doesn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already figured out, over thirty years of practice.  But he comes out and states things that my experience had only hinted at.  And he systematizes it.  He has that kind of mind.  Check out his outline of practice.

The man has a fascinating background.  He began as a linguist, a totally unpopular nerd and underachiever at his regular high school in Los Angeles but the valedictorian at the local Japanese ethnic school, which he went to at the same time.  He studied languages at UCLA, did graduate work in Buddhist studies at Wisconsin.  He traveled to Japan in the hope of doing a dissertation on Shingon Buddhism, but the monastery’s abbot told him it wasn’t an intellectual study, that if he wanted to work there he would have to do menial tasks.  The man wouldn’t compromise.  It was his way or the highway.  Almost by accident Young began to meditate with one of the monks who had a separate sitting group, arrived at some level of samadhi, and realized the menial tasks were a way of taking his burgeoning samadhi into everyday life.  They weren’t just to keep the place clean.  They were a vital part of practice.

It was while he was studying in Japan that he met a Jesuit named William Johnston, who had come as a missionary but became devoted to sitting, and who let Young know that there is a contemplative tradition not just in the East, but in all traditions; while the doctrines of different religions might contradict each other, the experiences of their mystics all sound alike.  Of all the teachers I know, Young is the most open to, and most knowledgeable about, what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy, the way so many traditions describe the same thing.

Young eventually wound up at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, where he studied and taught vipassana meditation, but he also did some time at Mt. Baldy with Joshu Sasaki, the infamous Zen teacher who lived to be 108 years old but was outed late in life as a sexual predator.  Sasaki Roshi had a unique teaching (which he expounded in every dharma talk, basically the same thing again and again), and it has obviously influenced Young, with his talk of expansion and contraction and zero.  He’s picked up teaching wherever he could find it.  Somehow he manages to pull it all together.

Young actually begins at a place where most Zen teachers end, with the word enlightenment.  Ask a Zen teacher what that is, and how to achieve it, and he’ll burst into a furious diatribe and tell you how stupid you are, trying to obtain something from your practice.  You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t hit you with a stick.  But Young is happy to tell you what enlightenment is.  He does so quite casually.

He also tells you how to attain it, and here he gets into the same things my Zen teacher has been telling me for years, but is more particular and precise.  He says that the three basic facets of practice are concentration power (coming back to some object of focus again and again), sensory clarity (seeing what is actually happening, and deconstructing it into simpler parts), and equanimity (not being calm or happy all the time, but being okay with whatever emotion arises.  It’s like what Eihei Dogen apparently said, “The enlightened mind is the mind that is intimate with every mind state.”  You might be burning with rage, but you fully experience the rage).

His description of clarity is especially interesting.  Young emphasizes how helpful it is to deconstruct our experiences.  The anxiety I was feeling on that sesshin—like every other strong emotion—was composed of mental images, verbal thinking, and strong feelings in the body.  My teacher’s advice—concentrate on the feelings in the body, see the thoughts and images but let them go, don’t get caught up in them—is essentially what Young advises us to do.  Over time, as we sit more and more, especially if we sit for long periods, we become confident that we can sit with any physical sensation, especially because, when they get difficult, they sometimes break up into pure energy.  We also see how bizarre our thoughts and verbal images are[2] (or at least don’t fixate on them.  We don’t give them oxygen).  We take an overwhelming emotion like fear and break it into smaller things that we can handle.

The problem with Young’s approach (which I’m sure he understands, and deals with as he teaches) is that someone might sit down and expect all this to happen, and if it doesn’t, be worried that they’re not doing it right.  That’s why the Zen approach—which leaves you flailing around in your experience, but also urges you to have the experience you’re having, not look for anything special to happen—is effective.  It’s actually what I prefer.  I can’t do all the things the vipassana teachers instruct me to do (like become so focused on the breathing that I never notice anything else).  I sit there and try in my half-assed way, and see what happens.  What happens becomes the great teacher.

Still, it’s good to encounter the other thing now and then.  It’s good for a Zen student to go on a vipassana retreat (which I used to do all the time; I loved those retreats, but kept wanting the teacher to shut the hell up and let us sit in silence.  Quit babying us!  Let us do this!), or a vipassana student to go on a Zen retreat (why’s it so quiet in here?  They don’t give us any help at all!  Everybody’s eating so fast!).

I also don’t like his focus on enlightenment (it’s as if you just started jogging and somebody tells you that if you don’t finish in the top twenty of the Boston Marathon you won’t have done anything[3]).  It’s setting up a goal, and even vipassana teachers usually admit that the way to screw everything up is to have some imagined goal for your practice.

I also don’t follow Young into his final wish (what he calls “My Happiest Thought”), that someday science and spiritual practice will not only come together (they seem to be doing that), but that science will find some way to speed the enlightenment process up, so that people will be more easily enlightened, and many will become enlightened.  As he points out, the teaching is that we’re already enlightened, but that something is standing in the way of realizing it, and if we could just get that thing out of the way, voila, we’d be enlightened.  He speaks of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight and a medical condition called athymhormia, where people seem to be fully present but don’t have any idea that it’s time for lunch.  To me the idea of speeding up enlightenment is like saying, “Hey man, you don’t need to climb Mt. Everest, I can get a helicopter and fly you up there.  Let me set that up for you.  I got this.”

In Zen we feel that the whole experience is the thing, not just getting there (and to Young’s credit, he devotes plenty of space to the long process of purification.  What about that endless process, I can’t help wondering.  You’re going to speed that up?).  The point is not to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but to have the experience of climbing.  And if you do that, and still don’t reach the top, it’s just as valuable.  It’s called human existence.  A human life.

Or as my wife would say—she’s a contemplative Catholic—all the struggles we’re going through are purifying our soul.  That’s the point.

[1] A case in point is the great Eihei Dogen.  Here’s his instruction for how to handle the mind: “Think not thinking.  How do you think not thinking.  Beyond thinking.  This is the essential art of zazen.”  Thanks, Eihei (if I may call you that).  You’ll all heart.

Actually, this is perfect instruction, once you understand it.  It’s exactly what to do.

[2] I may just be speaking for myself.

[3] Young, however, is not overly fixated on enlightenment experiences.  He thinks it can kind of sneak up on you.