Stay Right Here
A spiritual identity and a spiritual experience seem like great things. After all, who doesn’t want to have spiritual experiences — like feeling the divine all around you? And who doesn’t want to be more identified with what we might call “spiritual” personality traits, like kindness, openness, love, and acceptance?
The vast majority of contemplative and meditative practices encourage both of these things — powerful spiritual experiences, and a powerful spiritual identity.
Not so much in Zen, though.
It’s not because Zen is a killjoy in principle, even if it can be a buzzkill from time to time. Yet Zen’s sober view of spirituality is one of the main reasons I wrote When the Buddha Needs Therapy.
Let me explain.
In April 2012, Junpo had deemed me ready for priest ordination. The ordination retreat was held on the East Coast, not far outside of Philadelphia. On the second day, I was working with a fellow retreatant, a young man who had a powerful spiritual experience of bliss and an overwhelming joy. When I was working with him, I felt the transmission of his mental state, and was myself carried away in what seemed to be divine love. I had the sensation of being “breathed,” for hours on end, where my breath was not my own but seemed to be coming, somehow, from outside of me. (It felt really, really, really good.)
I had a burning sensation in my diaphragm, and placing my hand on that spot confirmed it was much warmer than any other part of my body. My pupils were dilated, and my eyes glassy and remote when I saw myself looking back from a mirror. I remember the thought arising, “This is what enlightenment is!” and being overwhelmed with joy at the thought of spending the rest of my days wrapped in this feeling.
My emotions were far away, small little things that arose like watching a breeze move through trees outside a window. My body, too, seemed distant, something hardly inhabited at all. I was sure this was a major milestone in my spiritual growth, and I was sure that this would be my new normal.
I was awake! Finally!
On my fourth day, I passed Junpo in the hallway. Truthfully, I hardly noticed him approaching and was prepared to give a gentle nod of my head as he passed. But at the last moment, he stepped in front of me and I crashed into him. He grabbed two fistfuls of my shirt and shook me violently — like a ragdoll.
“Right fucking here!” he bellowed, snapping me out of my stoned state. “Kogen! [my Zen name]. Keep your feet on the fucking ground! You stay right here — don’t go floating away in the fucking clowds on me. RIGHT HERE. Enlightenment is vicsceral, embodied — it’s HERE, right fucking here, not out there somewhere!”
And as abruptly as he had confronted me, he’d let go of my shirt, stepped around me, and continued walking down the hall as if nothing had happened.
What the fuck? I thought, looking after him. What is he on about?
Like many of the things he taught me in those days, I didn’t understand the teaching. I put it on a shelf in my mind and left it there, to be revisited if needed, but I remember dismissing what he’d said as no longer relevant to me. After all, I was awake.
It turned out, not so much.
Six months later, that feeling of bliss and connection had crumbled so profoundly, so thoroughly and completely, that it was simply intolerable to be stuck in my Keith-ness again, my petty, small, contracted, dualistic self. I found myself longing to get back to where I had been, to recapture my lost Enlightenment. The mental and emotional anguish was extraordinary, but then I remembered what Junpo had told me, and took the teaching back off the shelf again.
I applied it, turning into my discomfort instead of trying to transcend it, get above it, or have it somehow be less real. I won’t lie — it still sucked, but at least it wasn’t the suck of escape and denial. And it taught me one of the most important lessons I had to learn on my own path. Namely, this:
What’s wrong with a spiritual experience? And what’s wrong with identifying as a spiritual person? Simple, really.
Experiences come and go, and experiences are always experienced by an ego. Good experiences, bad ones, sublime ones, boring ones, spiritual ones, sensual ones.
Identities are constructs of the mind, impermanent, unstable, and easily overwhelmed by the power of what is (sometimes known as "life").
Over the 10 years since that retreat, I would come to understand what Junpo said with much greater clarity.
Junpo, trickster though he was, was able to deeply ground in a nondual view of the world. It’s difficult territory, because if you have never experienced it yourself, it’s almost impossible to not try and grab your spiritual experiences and say what I had said: “I am awake.”
Egos don’t awaken. They can be transformed by the awakening process, but at the end of the day egos are dualistic and always in relationship to something else. But awake is just awake, aware is just aware -- and in relationship to nothing, which is why we sometimes say in Zen that awakening is empty. Quite simply, we don’t awaken — awakening awakens.
The grand ultimate truth, enlightenment, is by definition fully here now. The grand ultimate truth cannot come and go; the only thing that can come and go is our ability to realize it. Makes sense, yes? The deepest, timeless truth of the universe is not bound by us or our perceptions of it any more than a sunset goes away because we stop looking at it.
This is what Junpo was trying to show me. I wasn’t awake, and I hadn’t become enlightened -- because "I" can't do that. Since I was having an ego experience, and since ego experiences inevitably fade, my frame doomed me to chasing something already fully here, trying to “discover” or “find” enlightenment, which is like trying to “discover” or “find” my own face.
I had what I sought. That was — and is — absolutely true. And it is true that I had to get out of the way to realize what I already had. You can’t seek what you already have, and are. You can only realize it by allowing it to be. This also is completely and totally true.
Of course, Junpo said all of this many years back, without ever opening his mouth.
