ApresZen

A Gathering of Sorrows
Philadelphia, PA

The koan - The god of fire seeks fire - that John offered last night at PZI proved a difficult one for me to stay focused on. I don't know if that means that I should work harder at focusing on it, or if it means that it just was not sticky enough right now for me to stay present with it.

One learning that is coming to me slowly, but steadily, is a budding awareness of a capacity to sit without judgment, and just notice my own steady stream of thoughts, images, memories and fantasies. It is all about noticing, nothing more, nothing less. Noticing how quickly thoughts appear - literally out of nowhere - and return just as quickly into that netherworld between memory and forgetfulness.

John began his talk with a description of the nature of meditation. He seems to be doing that quite often. Perhaps he is working on an article, or book, about meditation. I hope so. It would be wonderful to read what he might have to say in a similarly deep and generous way as he has with his other books (and here).

He said, Most of us come to meditation through some sort of dissatisfaction, or disappointment. That sure resonated with me! He spoke for a bit about these disappointments and sorrows using a very elegant phrase - he called them "a gathering of sorrows". That also resonated with my experience of sorrows. They do seem to gather together, huddled in some dark, murky, yet somehow fertile place.

Then he said something very intriguing. He said, "Koans are ways for us to be unfaithful to our sorrows." What an intriguing possibility. Being unfaithful to our/my sorrows, betraying them, what might that do to my relationship with my own disappointments - both large and small?

After that he began to focus on consciousness remarking that consciousness also creates possibilities for errors. I thought of this sort of as corrupted code in a way. Then he used a lovely little example. He described it as: A moment when we might come across a snake on a path in front of us, and then we see that it is just a stick. Yet, we still avoid that path for the rest of the summer.

That last part was the sticky bit for me - the idea that, even though I "know" there was no snake, I am still not sure that I know. And I keep looping back to the snake. It is the looping back, a kind of skip in the record, that seems so familiar to me.

[This morning - Tuesday - on the way to the airport the driver of the BART train at one point called out the wrong destination for our train he said, "Pittsburg/Bay Point Train". Nothing so odd about that. The interesting thing is that he did it again a few stops later. He said it exactly the same way... but then he laughed. That moment reminded of John's snake example. These "errors in consciousness" tend to be repeated, like the train operator. Once he laughed, though, it was as if he had this mini-meditation, and reset his awareness to zero. The rest of the trip he got the destination right, by the way☺.]

Back to last night. So, the important point for me about all this snake and stick business is that John asserted that with meditation we can reset our consciousness in some ways that may be impossible to articulate. It is as if consciousness were some organic system that doesn't need repairing as it would if I were holding an image of consciousness as a machine. But in his experience it can be "reset", or cleared out in some way. I believe I have had that experience now and again. Not very often, but as John said: If it can happen in one moment, it is possible that it could happen in another and another; so then it is possible that you could become free.

Later in the talk John asked a rather provocative question. He asked: Who is the most important person in the world to you right now? Of course, I immediately thought of my son, Matt. (Who did you just think of, gentle reader? ☺) Then he answered his own question. He suggested that, It is not your partner, not your son or daughter (even though his daughter was in the dojo). Instead he said, "The most important person to you right now is the one you are talking to. There is no one else in this moment. There is nothing else but this moment."

Toward the end of his talk John returned to a theme he has visited before, but it is a theme that I cannot revisit enough - I guess it is my god of fire seeking fire. That theme is about resting in uncertainty. About how the mind seeks certainty where none exists.

As an example of this uncertainty he spoke of the idea of substituting positive thoughts for negative ones. He does not know if that is a good thing or not, but I gather he has the sense that pushing these "negative thoughts" away would only serve to feed them somehow. Then he said that, If we can go deeper, beyond positive and negative thoughts, for just one moment to no thought...

Again I thought of his assertion that, since this moment is all there is, each moment holds within itself the possibility for freedom.

And maybe I had a small glimpse of that during the meditation. There was a moment there when I was not seeking, when I was not judging: Is this a good thought? Why am I thinking this thought when I drove all the way up here with Roger? I should be thinking better thoughts than these...

There was that moment when I was not seeking, not judging, not feeling either ashamed or proud, when maybe for a moment I was free.

Time to rest in some uncertainty.

Après après zen (Wednesday): When I finally did sit with this koan for more than half a second, it occurred to me that the god of fire in Greek mythology is Hephaestus, or Vulcan to the Romans. He is also called the lame god because he was born crippled. He is the patron of craftsmen, especially metalworkers and blacksmiths.

Something about his being lame and crippled that caught my attention. Also, the thought of the blacksmith's arms and hands being so strong. An interesting connection to the "No Hands" koan.

In some deep archetypal way I am also paying attention to the story of how Hephaestus fashioned the first woman, Pandora, out of clay. In some stories it is Pandora ("the one who received all gifts from the gods") who unleashed evil on the world. In other, perhaps older stories, it was Pandora who actually closed the box (or jar) in time to capture hope for mankind.

In any event this god of fire - whether he (or she) be Indian, or Greek, or Christian - is a complex figure. And this koan is a wonderful invitation to enter into the mystery of fire seeking fire.