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Why couldn’t he understand? This wasn’t a fantasy! This was true! It had nothing to do with my working in “the animation business.” This was serious and deeply profound. Come on! Merging With The Mind Of God! How can you get any deeper and more profound?

I nearly cried as I read his e-mail to me. I’m sure I would have broken down if he’d said that to me in person. I spent the whole morning just feeling sorry and confused. It was a huge come-down. There could be none more huge.

BUT AS THE DAY WORE ON, I began to notice a few things that I’d been too stupid to suss out for the past few weeks. For one thing, if your experience of enlightenment is real, no one can ever take it from you or deny it. Enlightenment means manifesting truly what you really are at every moment. No amount of criticism from anyone can ever take that away any more than someone’s critical words could somehow magically make your nose disappear.11 No one can take you away from you.

But my big experience of merging with God, however profound and moving it was at the time, was in the past. It wasn’t here and it wasn’t now. In fact, the memory was so powerful it was standing in the way of my real experience of here and now. I was sacrificing my real, everyday existence for a dream. Whether I really experienced the beginning and end of the universe or not was entirely beside the point. It didn’t matter right now because right now that was not what I was experiencing. I was experiencing being a formerly elated guy sitting at his desk in an office in Tokyo feeling sorry for himself. What happened that night was gone. Gone like the day I received the Buddhist precepts, gone like the day I first heard the Heart Sutra, gone like every gig Zero Defex ever played, gone like my first kiss was gone, gone like my childhood in Nairobi was gone. Gone, gone, gone, never to return no matter how much I wished, grieved, or fantasized.

This kind of thing is a common problem among zazen practitioners. They have these really cool experiences, or really cutting insights, and then they latch onto them forever, like a pitbull onto a postman’s ass—effectively missing ........... out on the rest of their lives. It’s a game the ego plays: if it can’t keep you believing in it through all the usual methods, it tosses something that feels just like what you always imagined enlightenment ought to feel like. Once you start believing in that stuff your ego’s got you right where it wants you. You’ll never be able to look at your day-to-day life honestly again.

But you’ve got to forget all of that stuff and get back to where you are.

BY LUNCHTIME I’d been mulling over Nishijima’s e-mail for a couple hours and I just felt kind of doomed to trudge through the rest of my dumb, sad, sorry little life.

But there was something else twinkling at the edge of my mind. I knew my life wasn’t really bad at all. It was a lovely thing. It was a precious, fragile, and very valuable thing. There are many diamonds in the world and if you lose your favorite, you can work hard, earn a lot of money and get another one to replace it. But the moments of your life aren’t like that. Once they’re gone, they’ll never return. Each and every one is the most precious thing in existence. You can never meaningfully compare one moment with any other. You can never meaningfully compare your life with anyone else’s. No matter how rich someone else may be, no matter how happy they look, no matter how enlightened they seem, they can never be you. Never, ever, ever.

Only you can live your life.

My wife had given me a mikan, a kind of Japanese tangerine, for lunch that day—and I sat at my desk and started to peel it. As I watched the peel come free from the fruit, I was struck by how beautiful it was. It was one tangerine, perfect in its own way. The orange color leapt out at me, as if it was glowing from the inside, brighter than a neon light. The intensity of its beauty was almost painful to me. I’ve seen some beautiful sights in my life: sunset over the Pacific from the western shore of Maui, Mount