ApresZen

No Hands
Berkeley, CA

Last night during the meditation session at PZI John presented a koan about work. The koan goes more or less like this:

(Two teachers are speaking, as I recall)
Work, work, work. All day long all you do is work.
Why do you do it?
I do it for another.
Why doesn’t he do it for himself?
Because he has no hands.

Of course John mixed the genders nicely. I believe, though, that when I first heard this koan, the "another" in my mind was female, or at least feminine in some archetypal way. I wonder what meaning to make of that. Is it about the feminine in me “having no hands”, unable to do for herself? Too easy, too tidy an explanation, I suspect.

Anyway, all the usual associations about hands began to emerge during the meditation. All the grasping and handling. I even thought of the “all hands” meetings in Silicon Valley. At some point in the meditation Roger’s hands came into my awareness. I seemed to reconnect for a moment with the feeling of his hands cupped behind my head, supporting my head and neck during The Ordeal. That feeling of completion, as if those cupped hands could have held water poured into them without any dripping through his fingers, as if his hands had been fused into a bowl.

The healing that comes from without when I have no hands within.

Another odd coincidence occurred that day. Earlier, I was speaking with a friend about the nature of work. We spoke of how the less effort we put into it sometimes, the more we can get done. How I/we hold stories about “hard” work, and so forth. At one point in the conversation she talked about work as play. In this moment – the day after – I find myself noticing that the koan doesn’t speak of “hard work”, just continual work.

Now I notice that I am substituting the word play for work in the koan:

Play, play, play. All day long all you do is play. Why do you do it?
I do it for another.
Why doesn’t she play herself?
Because she has no hands.

The child in service to the adult. Losing my capacity to play is another way to cut off my hands. There is something delightful about holding play as a kind of service. In fact I believe John said something like that in his talk when he spoke of a certain delight we can take from being in service to another.

John also spent a fair amount of time talking about meditation itself, and the nature of consciousness that can emerge from meditation. As he has done before, John spoke of kindness embedded deeply in consciousness. I took from that how, when we strip away all the extraneous baggage that seems to hang on our awareness – like too many coats piled on a coat rack, that when they all fall away, what is left is kindness.

I may have experienced a small glimmer of that during the meditation. For a brief moment, when I was in touch with my handlessness, my helplessness, I felt shame cover me like a dark, cold shroud. And then miraculously (or so it seemed) a thought bubble appeared. It said, The shame is a sham. I almost laughed out loud. A lightness seemed to be sitting quietly inside that shroud. Then an image appeared – an image of dark, jagged shards of rock falling from two sides of a great precipice. As if a gold motherlode lay beneath it. And then for just a moment I felt settled and safe.

On the ride back from the zendo Roger and I spoke for a while about work and art, continuing in a way the conversation we had on the way up to Santa Rosa. Now, though, there was a shift for me. There was something that Roger said that came as a gift. At some point he used the phrase “God-given talent”. When he used that phrase, for some reason I thought of the word “grace”. In a religious sense, Grace is the unearnable gift of God’s love. We spoke of “gracefulness” for a while, and there was a feeling of grace, of some unearnable kindness, present in the car as we drove over the coastal mountains into the inland valley.

Now, I have a new koan to turn this way and that in my mind:

Love, love, love. All day long all you do is …
Why do you do it?
I do it for another…

Posted by Edd at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Philadelphia, PA
6 February 2007

Sitting last night was a bit easier than usual. Not sure what to make of that. Probably not much. But I did notice that I needed to expend less effort just sitting with the koan John offered. The koan went something like this:

10,000 feet below the ocean there is a stone.
Try to lift it without wetting your hands.

I immediately found myself in touch with my stone-ness in some surprising way. Perhaps it was the sense of isolation that allowed me to create some connections to the stone. I also found myself enjoying the "sinking feeling" of dropping down to the ocean floor. Actually, John mentioned something about dropping down in his talk afterwards, but I forget what it was.

In his brief talk John spoke quite a bit about meditation. He said, Meditation is about being human in the deepest way. I am not at all sure what he meant by that. Why is meditation the "deepest way"? I wonder why any mindful action couldn't also be the deepest way.

Later John said something else that caught my attention. He was speaking about the power of using koans in meditation, saying because of them, we don't have to use our own effort. Maybe that was why I experienced such a relative lack of effort this go around. Maybe I was letting the koan do the heavy lifting for a change.

Toward the end of his talk, John then said something else that also caught my attention. He said, The vastness of meditation allows us to be at ease with whatever we are experiencing. Without judgment. This informed me that I still have a ways to go on the blissful enlightenment path! I have not gotten to the point in my meditations where I experience them as "vast". Not all that constricting to be sure, but not vast either.

Finally, I want to capture here an image that came to me during the mediation. At some point well into the meditation session I began to see the koan in terms of a relationship between the ocean and the stone. The sense I had was what I can only term as some sort of loving indifference. It was loving in that neither one was doing any harm - in fact I might say that they were informing each other. The ocean is everywhere that the stone is not. And the stone exists as an absence of ocean-ness on its own floor. I guess more to the point I had the sense that each was touching the other in some sort of "loving" way. Odd thought, but there it is. Yet, at the same time I was completely aware of how indifferent one is to the other. Neither focusing on outcome, nor attempting to control the other. Letting each other be, I guess is one way to look at it.

The dry hands in the koan was mostly a distraction in the moment, so I paid little attention to that part of it. Except that I did notice that the roundedness of the stone made it just as impossible for me to get a "handle" on it, as it would be to dip my hands into the ocean and keep them dry. What other parts of my life am I trying to "get a handle on"? Where am I judging these parts, and so not allowing them to show me a way to hold them without handling them?

Well that is it for now. Hope you keep your hands dry.

Posted by Edd at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)