Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [16]
He was a guy, just like me. He claimed no exalted titles and didn’t try to bowl anyone over with clever phrases or enlightened-sounding talk. He made no promises he had or could deliver enlightenment, or anything else for that matter. He was just Tim. If what he said sounded interesting to you, he’d tell you some more. If you weren’t interested, it was no skin off his ass—and that attitude made me very interested indeed. I’d never come across a representative of any religion who wasn’t trying to convince me of something, who wasn’t trying to sell me on his faith, who, in fact, didn’t give two shits whether I believed in or even listened to what he had to say.
In my first class with Tim, he gave a lecture about the Heart Sutra that so profoundly rocked my mental world that I’ve devoted a chapter to it later on in this book. He also introduced the class to the practice of zazen, which was what the Zen school calls the kind of meditation they do. Meditation was definitely not de rigueur for Kent State University. In spite of its reputation as a “radical school” following the events of May 4, 1970, KSU was about as lame and conservative as any state-run university anywhere in America. The whole class was pretty taken aback when Tim whipped out a couple dozen black cushions from a duffel bag, had us sit cross-legged on them, and told us just to be still and stare straight ahead at the walls. Blinking was fine and scratching or shifting positions was okay as long as we didn’t do too much of it. We weren’t given any mantras to think about, nothing to visualize, no instructions on counting our breath—nada. There was no sitar music playing in the background (though he did light up a stick of incense). He told us just to stay that way for the next twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes?! I thought, along with everyone else in the class. Sitting still?! Not doing anything?! Half the kids in that class nearly died of shock at the very thought.
Me, though, I was into it. I’d been trying to meditate on and off ever since I’d read some descriptions of the practice in one of the Hare Krishna magazines. But the Hare Krishnas, I later learned, don’t go for the whole idea of silent meditation. To them, chanting “Hare Krishna” is the only way to achieve what they call transcendental consciousness . The descriptions of silent meditation practices in their magazines and books are full of stuff about guys who cut the tendons on the bottoms of their tongues so they can stick them up their noses and similar gross-out stories (though frankly the spiritual benefit of such behavior is not immediately apparent to me). For all I knew at the time, they were the voice of authority on the subject. And I wasn’t about to slice up my tongue.
So I eventually gave up pursuing meditation. But from Tim I was getting instruction from someone who actually knew how to do it and actually did it himself. I figured I’d be seeing visions of four-armed Krishnas and Vishnus descending from the heavens in no time flat. Or maybe I’d fade into The Void just like in The Beatles’ song “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I might even reach nirvana (I think I’d read about that once in a Mad magazine cartoon). But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting into my head. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, I figured. Maybe I was missing something crucial. Maybe what I was doing on my cushion with my stupid mind as I was staring dumbly at the wall wasn’t quite it.
Now I can look back after twenty years of practice and say: Nope—that was it. Boring, boring, boring. Just sitting there. But even then, from that first day, there was something about zazen that just felt somehow right.
It was a practice that demanded nothing at all—and everything. There were no