Some people think we should be using science and medicine to prolong our lives for thousands of years, even make us immortal. That hunger for more experience, more books, more food, is what the mind does, and when you’ve been taught your whole life that that craving, a big part of the sensation of being alive, is your real self, of course you’re terrified of letting it go. Especially when no one can really promise you that anything better will happen at the end than that you will simply go out like a candle.

I’ve lain awake at night in a cold sweat, heart pounding, overwhelmed with terror at the knowledge that one day I will cease to exist. I will never know anything again. I won’t find out what happens next. No more drinks with friends, no more really good books, no more walks in the park with the smell of flowers in the air. No more new experiences. No more really good arguments, no more passion, no more just knowing that here I am, I am breathing, I am alive. No more “I.” Not even nothingness, because you need awareness to know that there’s nothing. I’ve had to reach over and turn on the light, watch some stupid tv, do anything I can to distract myself, because there was no way to reconcile myself to this fear. This thing is going to happen to me, and it’s going to happen to you, too.

I used to picture it like going over Niagara Falls. We’re all helpless in the current, nothing to hold onto, and we can pitch over the edge into oblivion at any moment. Whether we like it or not, we’ll get there someday.

Here’s a notion you’ll come across in Buddhism if you look into it even a little bit: That there is no Self, and therefore there’s nothing to fear from death because you don’t exist anyway. I find this bald statement pretty inadequate. For sure, the longer you meditate, the better your chance of reaching the kind of insight that might take away the fear of no longer existing. You can’t be told, you have to experience this knowledge yourself. I got a little peek into this a few weeks ago, at jury duty.

Funny place for a metaphysical insight. There I was at the Criminal Courthouse, parked on a bench in the hallway, waiting to be called, or not, to serve on a jury. It’s an odd situation, not only because you don’t know whether you’ll have to serve or not, but because since everyone is called at random, nobody there is acquainted with anybody else. We are all strangers.

So I had two days to sit among strangers, watching the process, and finishing my book, which happened to be Brad Warner’s “Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality.” I don’t like to read about Buddhism, as I think it muddies my expectations, but I love his approach and strongly recommend this book as an introduction. Because he doesn’t care about “sounding like a Buddhist,” he puts things into words that even an ignorant American like me can understand. Or maybe I just get him because he was a punk, too.

I was reading what Brad has to say about the Heart Sutra. This is a piece of writing that is said to encompass the essence of what Buddha had to teach. Basically, it says that with the realization that the five skandhas are shunyata, all suffering ceases. Got that?

It’s so hard to talk about this stuff with words. English is a terrible language for it, which is why we hang on to words in Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali. Any words fall short – words are also shunyata, by the way – but Sanskrit probably comes closest.

Let me explain what I mean by that. There are five skandhas, which is a Sanskrit word for, it says in Wikipedia, mass or heap, something like that. “Aggregate” is a good translation. The five skandhas are:

• Form (the material world, and our body and senses)
• Feeling (emotion, or our reaction to form)
• Perception (cognition)
• Will (thoughts, ideas, opinions, decisions)
• Consciousness (self-awareness)

The five skandhas are what make You exist. In the west we believe there’s something else underlying all of that, which is your Self, which experiences those things. In Buddhism, those five skandhas are your Self – that’s all there is. Apart from those five skandhas, you do not exist.

(I’m stealing this image from Brad) Say you have a pile of garbage. Take parts of it away one by one – the tin can, the old shoe, the banana peel. Take all the parts away. Where is your pile of garbage? It doesn’t exist. It never really existed in the first place, except as an aggregation of parts. That’s the Self.

What zazen allows to happen is that you come to see the parts for what they are, which is shunyata. Shunyata is usually translated as “empty.” Emptiness is another easily misunderstood Buddhist concept, one I’ve had a lot of trouble with. A better word might be “insubstantial.”  Take emotion, for example. Emotion is insubstantial. That doesn’t mean it’s not real; it’s just not real in the way that we think it is. It’s not a thing unto itself.

I think it was the garbage image that did it. For some reason, that resonated with me. I set the book down in my lap and just breathed.

There was hearing. There was sight. Smells happened. There was awareness of temperature, the air brushing my skin, the feeling of my ass against the bench and my clothes against my body. So, there was form – but it was not the solid world as we normally think of it. And there was nothing else. The other skandhas were not present.

And for a little while, I ceased to exist.

This little experience was totally unscary, and all too brief. There’s no risk, by the way, that the Self won’t come back. It’s a tenacious bugger. The Self comes into being when it’s reacting to something, and there’s always something to react to, even in an isolation tank. When I first started meditating, I realized that I was afraid of letting the constant chatter in my mind cease. I think I was as afraid of recognizing the insubstantiality of the Self as much as I was afraid that the thoughts might not come back. (No problem with that, by the way, as it turned out.)

What I saw on the bench that day was that my sense of being a Self is not real, not in the way I’ve been taught to think of it  That way is, in fact, pretty natural, given what we have to work with, and a very handy thing to have around. If you don’t believe that your Self is real, good luck getting a job and taking care of business. The goal is not to deny or destroy the Self; the goal is to see that there is no Self in that way to begin with, so therefore there’s no problem. The Self is the five skandhas, and they are shunyata. If I think of a good way to say that briefly in English, I’ll let you know.

Which brings me neatly back to where I started. Having begun to understand, I think, the way in which I do not exist, I fear death less. I definitely have a lot more work to do. But once there is understanding of what the Self truly is, and is not, there is understanding that all there is, is this moment. A thousand years is the same as a minute. We are each everything that there is, and therefore we never cease to exist. It’s just this particular set of sensation, emotion, cognition, will, and self-awareness that will cease. No problem.

]]> http://soundofrain.net/the-fear-of-death/feed/ 3 http://soundofrain.net/how-to-do-zazen/ http://soundofrain.net/how-to-do-zazen/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:43:19 +0000 soundofrain http://soundofrain.net/?p=218 There are lots of guides out there on how to do zazen. I check out a few every once in a while, looking for tips or just to remind myself of all the different elements, and remind myself that I’m not an expert. This one isn’t bad, and has clear photos, but it’s best if you have someone in person to show you the basics. A person could write a book on how to do zazen, but it’s really not complicated.

1. Wear comfortable clothes and find a soft place to sit.
2. Set up a timer so you don’t have to watch the clock.
3. Sit up straight, not leaning against anything, and breathe naturally.
4. Watch the breath. When thoughts and feelings occur, let them go and come back to the breath.
5. Be patient with yourself.

A soft place to sit

It’s best to sit on a cushion,  cross-legged or kneeling, with cushioning for your knees. Set up your cushions on the floor, facing a wall. If you have a quiet room to do this in, do it there. I basically live in one room, so I have a space against the wall that I can easily clear when I’m ready to meditate. Do what you need to do to make sure you won’t be interrupted – turn off the phone, etc.

In zen we use a small, round, firm cushion called a zafu, placed on top of a large square cushion called a zabuton. This is the best arrangement, but you can use other pillows and cushions or a folded blanket. I got my zafu at Samadhi Cushions and the zabuton is really just a big pillow from Bed Bath and Beyond.

If you have trouble with your knees or your hips, you can sit in a chair or a stool, but unless you have serious back problems, don’t lean against anything. The object is to sit up straight, with your spine in correct alignment, one vertebra stacked on another and your head centered on top. This is the best way to concentrate and keep yourself from falling asleep.

A timer

You’ll need something with which to time yourself. It’s not a good idea just to keep an eye on your watch, because you’ll get all focused on time instead of the breath. You can use an alarm clock, obviously; the little travel ones are not expensive and usually have alarms that are less obnoxious than the plug-in kind. There are meditation timers you can buy, but I find them too pricey. You can also download MP3 meditation timers online, like these at Audio Dharma, which start and finish with a simple bell.

I strongly suggest starting with a short time, even five minutes, and gradually work up until you can do the standard 45 minute sit.

Sit up straight

When we do zazen, before we begin, we stand in front of our cushion, place our hands in prayer position in front of our hearts (this is called gassho), and we bow to the cushion. There’s a lot of bowing in zazen, because the Japanese have been the custodians of zen for almost a thousand years, and there’s a lot of bowing in their culture, but I’ve grown to like it. Bowing to the cushion sets up a respectful attitude toward the practice. It also exercises the spine a little.

Set up your cushions and your timer. Bow to your cushion. Sit, and make sure you’re comfortable. You might have to experiment for a while to find your ideal position, with regard to the height of the cushion and how you arrange your legs. You want to be comfortably erect, not straining and not slumped. Ideally, your butt and your knees form a tripod that supports your spine. It’s a good idea to sway a few times to find the perfect spinal balance.

Westerners are not used to sitting on the floor, so your hips and knees might complain. Do not force your legs into lotus or half-lotus, especially if you’re over thirty. Once your cartilage has stopped growing, all you’re going to do is stretch it and weaken those joints, which is a very bad idea. I sit Burmese fashion, tops of my feet more or less flat on the floor in front of my hips, or with one ankle crossed over the other. Find what works for you, what makes you feel stable and comfortable and allows you to breathe freely.

You can just clasp your hands in your lap, or lay them on your thighs, or you can do the cosmic mudra (a mudra is a way to hold your hands that’s supposed to focus the mind in a specific way). Place your left hand in your right hand, palms up, the fingers lying on top of each other, and touch the tips of the thumbs together lightly.

In zen we keep the eyelids lowered but not closed, and eyes at rest.

Watch the breath

Don’t think about emptying your mind, or accomplishing something, or getting anywhere. Focus on the breath and just let your thoughts go. Breathe quietly, from the belly, through your nose. When you have a thought, recognize that it’s a thought, and don’t pursue it. In the beginning it helped me a lot to be mindful and present in the room, so instead of focusing on the breath, I would focus on the sensations of the space around me, the little sounds, etc. Not thinking about them, just noticing them.

You can also count the breath. I found this very helpful. At the end of each exhalation, count one, then two, etc. Go up to ten, then start over. You can quickly tell when you’ve been distracted, because either you’ve stopped counting, or you’re up to fourteen or something. I got up to twenty-one once before I realized I wasn’t paying attention. Again, don’t punish yourself for getting distracted, just let it go and come back to the breath. And start over at one.

Be patient with yourself

The Buddha shows us how it's done.

When you first start to do this, your mind will probably be jumping around like a crazy thing. Don’t worry about it. This is how everyone begins; this is just your mind doing what it does. Don’t punish yourself for getting distracted. Don’t tell yourself that you’re no good at zazen. This is zazen: sitting and focusing on the breath, and coming back to it when you get distracted.

Sit as still as possible. Be like a mountain. If you have an itch, just let it be. You will probably find that if you keep breathing and observe the itch, it becomes just sensation, and eventually fades. We don’t have to scratch every itch.

If you have trouble with pain, do the same thing. Just notice it and don’t worry about doing something about it. This gets easier with practice, and also, the more you sit, the less pain there is. Your body gets used to it. It develops the muscles in your back and neck that are needed to keep you upright without a chair to lean against. This can take time. It was over a year from when I started a regular practice until I could sit for the whole 45 minutes without screaming in pain inside my head by the end. Once I understood that shifting around, trying to ease the pain in my shoulders, was actually prolonging it, I made a lot of progress.

The point of zazen is not to achieve enlightenment, or samadhi, a transcendent state of blissful union with the universe. If that happens, great, but that’s not the point, and any zen master worth his or her salt will tell you that. The point of zazen is just to do it. Sit on the cushion. Focus on the breath. Practice letting thoughts and feelings happen without grabbing hold of them. When you find yourself thinking about something, relax and let it go. Come back to the breath.

When your time is up, put your hands in gassho (prayer position, in front of the heart) and bow again to your practice. This also helps limber up the spine, which might be stiff after sitting so still.

That’s it.

You can do this anywhere, at any time. It’s better to do it a little than not at all. And, while the benefits are not the point, there are definitely benefits. Medical research is always proving how beneficial meditation is, for your blood pressure, stress level, concentration, general peace of mind. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do zazen, or shave your head, or be a vegetarian. You don’t have to be anything.

Just do this one simple thing for yourself, and see what happens.