HOW ONE PERSON SEES BEING

As I have become more and more formally familiar with what would be called "zen mind" (or, more accurately, "zen no-mind") over the last fifty years, since age twenty or so, I see that even as a young child I was drawn towards that which was not apparent or not even, for all intents and purposes, there. As a young child, I was intently curious to find that which could not be "found," that which could not be spoken; I knew within myself that there was "something more" or "something quite hidden" that lay behind all appearances and was alive within myself. I'm not sure what happened first but both events did happen when I was seven years of age and had just moved into a "new" home in Albany (New York) in 1954. One event was that I was very sick with a fever and that I experienced myself literally "vanishing" before my eyes; I vanished from my own sight though I knew my consciousness was still present. The other event entails the fact that six months before we moved into our new home, the man who had lived there, came home one day from the bank where he worked and had hung himself in what was to become my bedroom. To be succinct, he appeared to me as a hanging man, eyes bugged and tongue hanging out, at the end of my bed, horrifying me. Then, realizing he had badly frightened me, he returned soon after as a voice and a physical presence but without physical appearance, that is, invisible. He was my friend for a number of years and we communicated almost every night. There is another ongoing event that eventually led me to an appearance of "zen accomplishment" but was really no such thing. My father, who had severe PTSD from WWII and D-Day, would go into freak-outs and be very physically abusive of me. At such times I "naturally" would leave my body to avoid the pain being inflicted upon me. I had a "ghost" as my best friend, so my "leaving the body" seemed rather natural to me as well. Many years later, the "zens" (I mean no disrepect with this term) thought I was quite an advanced meditator since I could "sit" (zazen) motionless for up to seven hours at a time. Once I realized how easy it was for me to "leave my body" like that, it became apparent that my challenge was to actually "come back in" to my body. In time I learned to live in my body and stay in when faced with confrontations, to the point of even getting into fights now and then (though more for self-protection and protection of others than mere arrogance). 

As time has progressed, my thinking has tended more and more towards zen notions of mu ("nothingness" or "emptiness" or "being") and Daoist notions of wu ("non-being" or "primordial being"). It seems to me, based on my own experience, that life and living point in this direction of a kind of "primordial oneness of being" in which no thing and no self (as ego) exist. I don't tend to be in that awareness at all but have seemed to have tasted it, as it were, in zazen and vipassana meditations and also in those few years in my 20s when I had the opportunity to take large amounts of LSD. The "spiritually hallucinogenic" qualities of lysergic acid are traced back to the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Temple of Demeter and beyond. Zen promulgates the "ordinary" of everyday life as the sacred "suchness of being." This is where my interest lies, though such an interest is not particularly conducive to any kind of conceptual writing, which is more of a Western habit of mental expression. I am still considering once again changing the title of the blog to Human Being, after already changing it to its current title. I seem to get more and more and more basic in my worldview or essential questioning. I also appreciate the notion that zen is based in the ability to doubt and to question, to always "look beneath," as it were, while in the midst of the "here and now" apparent world.