This episode is the story of my spiritual journey, part 4. I start sharing a series of what I’m calling “enlightenments” I experienced over the course of the first ten years or so of my monastic training. These “enlightenments” were transformational insights that allowed me, slowly but surely, to find the happiness and peace of mind I was searching for.
Read/listen to Story of My Spiritual Journey: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Enlightenment Versus Enlightenments in Zen
Enlightenment One: This Shit Is Real
Enlightenment Two: “What Is the Meaning of Life?” Is the Wrong Question
It’s been over two weeks since my last episode release, and if you want to know what I’ve been up to, check out my other podcast, Climate and YOU, and my most recent episode: The Coal Baron Blockade: My Story of Participating in a Nonviolent Direct Action. I’ll still release three Zen Studies episodes in April, though, so stay tuned.
This episode is the story of my spiritual journey, part 4. In case you haven’t already listened to them, the first three installments of my spiritual journey story can be found in:
Episode 174: Conveyor Belt to Death (covering my childhood and young adulthood up to the point where I discovered Buddhism at age 24)
Episode 175: Why I Think Buddhism Is Awesome (covering by early years of Buddhist practice up to my decision to ordain as a monk), and
Episode 176: A Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of Despair (covering my difficult early years of monasticism and how I started to emerge from my dark night of the soul)
In this episode I’ll start sharing a series of what I’m calling “enlightenments” I experienced over the course of the first ten years or so of my monastic training, and finish my story in next week’s episode. These “enlightenments” were transformational insights that allowed me, slowly but surely, to find the happiness and peace of mind I was searching for. I share them not in order to brag about them, or because I think you are going to find them useful. Such insights are deeply personal and there’s a sense in which no one else will ever understand them or their significance. I share them in order to illustrate how your spiritual journey has or will involve similar transformational insights – small “enlightenments” that may not sound all that remarkable when described or shared but change you forever in a significant way. I think it’s essential to recognize the importance of our enlightenments – to be grateful for them, and take time to process and integrate them.
Enlightenment Versus Enlightenments in Zen
Before I get started on sharing some of my most significant enlightenments, though, I want to say a few words about enlightenment in Buddhism and Zen. My use of the term “enlightenments” contrasts with a concept of singular “enlightenment,” which is often thought to involve a massive, complete, permanent shift from mere mortal to a nearly superhuman being who knows everything and subsequently displays impeccable behavior. As I’ll discuss in a bit, there dramatic awakening experiences definitely happen, but I don’t believe in singular and permanent enlightenment as just described. I’ve done previous episodes on enlightenment, including Episode 143 – The Experience of Enlightenment and Why It’s for All of Us, where I said, “It’s helpful if we stop viewing enlightenment in a dualistic, binary way, and instead see it more as an opening up, a deepening of intimacy, a widening of perspective, an increasing willingness to let go of our mental map of reality, and a growing familiarity with things-as-it-is.”
There is a strong emphasis on enlightenment, more often translated as awakening, in Buddhism and Zen. The reasoning goes like this: As sentient beings, we naturally want to be happy and avoid suffering. We only cause suffering for self and other because of our ignorance about the nature of reality and self. Some of this ignorance is the effect of many causes from the past, some of it is willful (that is, inspired by greed and ill-will). In any case, the most transformational change we can make in our behavior and mindset is awakening to reality – seeing clearly that “I-, me- and my-making” causes suffering; that moral behavior brings peace and true happiness; that our desire for things to be other than how they are compounds the pain we will inevitably encounter in our lives, etc. When we really see clearly, things naturally change.
Insights that help us decrease suffering and increase wisdom and compassion can range from tiny and mundane insights that happen every day, to significant ones that cause a lasting shift in our point of view or our behavior, to life-transforming insights we remember forever, to knock-your-socks off sudden shifts in understanding that leave us reeling and which take time to recover from and integrate. All insight is valuable.
In Zen, there’s a particular insight we believe to be essential. It’s called kensho, which means awakening to the true nature of self as empty or boundless. You might think of our delusion about having an independent, inherent, enduring self-nature as the foundational delusion – once that delusion is pulled out of our pile of delusions, like pulling out a cornerstone from a building, everything shifts. Contrary to what we might assume before this insight, kensho is not a transcendent philosophical realization (although it is profound). Kensho is experienced as an extremely personal thing. In fact, nothing is more personal. You find yourself immersed in your own direct experience and realize you aren’t at all who you thought you were.
There are many aspects of reality to awaken to, and kensho is just the beginning. Also, it’s misleading to suggest there is one, clearly definable kind of dramatic awakening. There are transformational openings before kensho. There are important openings after kensho. In Zen, “kensho” is a term for a dramatic awakening experience which is then certified by a qualified Zen teacher – but the teacher really has to know the student well, over a period of time. Teacher and student need to be near one another; you can’t just describe a far-out spiritual experience and ask a teacher to certify it if they don’t know you. The teacher needs to see your behavior – has it changed? How has this opening impacted you?
Anyway, I know people who have had certified kenshos and I know people who are amazing teachers who have not. One of my teachers, Kyogen Carlson, did have a kensho (I describe it Episode 143), and after many years of working with students he used to say that awakening happens like lotus flowers blooming in different ways. For some, often because of past trauma, the petals of the flower are stuck in place and then an opening experience causes the petals to pop open all at once – a dramatic, often disorienting, experience. For others the lotus blooms gradually and slowly, with a long series of small openings. Less dramatic, but these openings are easier to integrate into your life. I bloomed slowly and gradually. I know from watching others that a kensho experience does not necessarily make things easier. It does not necessarily give you anything that can’t be experienced through slower awakening, except for the dramatic experience itself.
What’s important is that you awaken to the truth, not how that awakening ends up looking from the outside. Awakening is also not a result we force through our practice. A moment of transformational insight happens by accident. However, as my teachers taught me, practice makes us more accident prone.
Over the years, our practice journey transforms us gradually, even if we do have dramatic opening experiences. Integration and manifestation are 90% of the work. This process is organic and different for every person. The result is a mature and generous person who is comfortable in their own skin. Someone who has deep faith in practice, not an infallible or perfect person. Not someone omniscient, or always happy. I like the teaching that there are no enlightened people, only enlightened actions. Enlightenment manifests each moment, it’s not something you gain and wear like a badge.
Anyway, with that preamble… I’ll share with you some of the insights I experienced over the course of my early years of training that made a big difference in my life.
Enlightenments #1: This Shit Is Real
I experienced countless transformational insights in the early years of practice. Remember, what makes an insight “transformational” is not how earth-shattering is in some objective sense, but how big a difference it makes in our life. For example, after practicing only a few months, I remember the first time I was able to reflect before I acted out a typical dysfunctional behavior pattern with my partner at the time. What had previously felt like a whirlpool I was destined to get sucked into – leading to frustration and hurt for both of us – suddenly seemed optional. I thought, “Hmm… what if I did something different this time?”
These kinds of insights into our own mind, body, and behavior are incredibly important and helpful. They’re an essential part of practice. However, they didn’t get at the deeper spiritual malaise that had been afflicting me since childhood. This is why, as I described in Episode 175, I decided to leave home, get ordained, and enter full-time Zen residential training. Once, as I was busy preparing to dismantle my life and devote my whole life to practice, my soon-to-be ex-husband looked at me and said, “You know, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.” At the time I had no response to that statement. I didn’t know whether I would or wouldn’t find relief from my suffering, but I knew I had to try.
One of the first transformational insights I remember of a more “spiritual” nature happened at the end of a month of intensive practice at Zen Mountain Monastery around 1999. I was in the process of exploring the possibility of ordination with my teacher, and she sent me to the monastery to get a taste of what I would be signing up for. Zen Mountain Monastery is in the Maezumi Roshi lineage and is a beautiful place in upstate New York. It’s a potent and vigorous practice environment incorporating many of the traditional Soto Zen monastic forms but adapting them for serious lay practitioners.
I absolutely loved my month in the monastery. I worked hard, soaked up all the teachings and practices, and stayed up late at night meditating. At the end of the month, I was bummed to be leaving.
My stay would end after the public Sunday program. There were about 80 people there, and John Daido Loori was giving the Dharma Talk. All month long he’d been lecturing on Dogen’s essay “Insentient Beings Speak Dharma.” In this essay Dogen quotes an ancestor, “insentient beings always speak dharma,” and then writes:
“In this way, concentrate and study closely what insentient beings always speak dharma is. Foolish people may think that the sound of trees, or the opening and falling of leaves and flowers, is insentient beings speaking dharma. Such people are not studying buddha dharma. If it were so, who would know and hear insentient beings speaking dharma? Reflect now: are there grass, trees, and forests in the world of insentient beings? Is the world of insentient beings mixed with the world of sentient beings? Furthermore, to regard grass and trees as insentient beings is not thoroughgoing. To regard insentient beings as grass, trees, tiles, and pebbles is not enough.”[i]
I was at the back of the large Zendo at Zen Mountain Monastery, behind tons of people, but at one point in the talk I had a sense that Daido looked directly at me – that we made momentary eye contact. At that moment I was flooded with a conviction that what he was talking about – the teachings of the insentient, along with emptiness and all the rest – was real. As real as the nose on my face, as real as my hands and breath. Not just some intellectual understanding, not just some view. Literally, physically real and true.
I don’t think Daido actually made eye contact with me, or had anything to do with this opening, except that he was a great teacher, and this was the very last day of an intensive month of training. But I was so deeply moved I had to find a room in the monastery where I could be alone and bawl my eyes out for a while.
I can’t remember who I told about this. I imagine I told someone, but frankly, most of our openings don’t make for good telling. Especially not to anyone who doesn’t appreciate the significance of openings, small and large! I can imagine someone experiencing a real, transformational enlightenment, and then saying to their friends something like, “I was watching a duck paddle around in the pond, and suddenly I realized I wasn’t separate from any other living beings!” If you were to share something like this in most groups of people, you’d get blank looks and a quick change of subject. Which is why Dharma friends are so precious – they appreciate the significance of these openings and are happy to listen and celebrate them with you.
Anyway, this opening was a small thing, but it gave me great determination for awaken to more, and to know all of this for myself. Roshi Kennett used to say, with respect to kensho and openings, that once you have seen a ghost, you can never again be someone who has never seen a ghost. These openings change us.
Enlightenments #2: “What Is the Meaning of Life?” Is the Wrong Question
The second “enlightenment” I want to share with you is related to the koan I had been wrestling with since young adulthood, as described in Episode 174: Conveyor Belt to Death. Ever since I could remember I had been troubled by the question, “What is the meaning of life?” I felt like I – and everyone around me – was simply living for the next episode of pleasure in our lives, and all of it was ultimately meaningless. This question was always with me – the background against which everything was measured.
Not even Zen had given me the meaning of life. From my point of view, it looked like Buddhism was a very effective way to make life less miserable, but it left the whole question of life’s meaning alone. If I had to hazard a guess, I would have said Buddhism agreed life was meaningless and the sooner we freed ourselves from the cycle of rebirth, the better. (I talk about the relationship between the concept of rebirth and the search for meaning in Episode 196 – Death and the Emptiness of Self: What’s the Meaning of Life If You’ve Got No Soul?)
Then, one day at work, things changed. I had a part-time job at that point because I was living at the Zen center but was not yet ordained. I’d been practicing Zen for about five years at that point, so I had developed some facility with my own mind. That is, I was able to notice what was happening in my mind and make some choices about what to pay attention to next. I was walking down a hallway carrying my usual dark suspicion that everything was meaningless, and it occurred to me: What if I walked down this hallway without the question I’d been brooding over ever since I could remember?
And then… I did. I walked down the hallway without the question, “What is the meaning of life?” The emptiness of my question was striking. I realized it was a creation of my own mind. My question was attached to a whole host of assumptions, an entire worldview in which life needed some kind of purpose, context, or justification that came from outside. This assumed there was something outside of life, a separate realm, a somewhere other than here. Come of think of it, this is actually a theistic perspective. When I was able to set aside my question of the meaning of life, when I walked down that hallway without it, it was like being relieved of a huge burden. I was able to walk upright, look around, and perceive things in a new way. I was no longer measuring each thing against my question and finding it wanting.
Unfortunately, this was not the end of my sense of bleakness and despair about life (as I described in Episode 176: A Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of Despair), but I never again worried about the “meaning of life” in the same way. I also appreciated in a deep way how the problem lay in my own mind, not in the world. I marveled at how effectively we can make misery for ourselves simply through the views and assumptions we carry around. Openings may be small, but only in a relative sense, and who cares, ultimately, about comparing them to one another? What matters is if it has made a difference to you – and sometimes being able to see through or drop a single thought can be quite transformational.
I’ll continue next week with several more “enlightenments,” and then describe how I decided to continue on the path of being a Soto Zen priest once I no longer felt I was on a conveyor belt to death. I hope you’ll tune in, thanks for listening!
Endnote
[i] Dogen, Zen Master. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo . Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
