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Dharmette: Stories (3 of 5) Starting Zen

Hello and welcome to this week where I tell stories from my life, practice stories, and hopefully you'll find them interesting and nice to hear.

At some point in 1978, I graduated from college. I'd been meditating in college for the last two years in Davis, twice a week. I had visited the San Francisco Zen Center in 1974, or 1975 I think it was. I then went back to Norway for a year and later decided to get an agricultural degree at UC Davis.

Because I'd been to the San Francisco Zen Center, an urban center, I naively thought that every urban center had a Zen Center. So I went looking for one in the small town of Davis. I went to the religious studies department and asked them if there was a Zen Center in Davis. They said no. But somehow I discovered—maybe they told me—that there was a small Zen sitting group that met. It was a couple, Lee and Vicki Stewart, who hosted a small sitting group in their little apartment. They had two bedrooms, one very small one.

I started sitting with them twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Sometimes there were only the three of us, and sometimes there were four or five people there. It was very small. It was very special to be able to go twice a week while I was in college.

I meditated every day in college. Looking back now, that might be unusual for a college student, but it seemed completely natural for me. I'd get up in the morning and meditate for 40 minutes, and before going to bed, another 40 minutes. Then twice a week I'd go sit with the Stewarts.

I had a wonderful experience one evening sitting with them. I had some kind of hallucination, and I don't know where it started and where it ended. I was sitting the way you sit in Zen meditation—with your eyes open, facing a wall. Since the bedroom was quite small, we had to have our knees right up against the wall, so it was really close.

While meditating there one day, this majestic, authoritative, solid, serious Roman column rose up in front of me, like something you'd have in front of a bank to show it's a serious institution. Engraved in black, going downwards on this column, were the letters Z-E-N, Zen.

That was certainly a hallucination, and I don't know where it stopped or continued. But the experience I had was that I went to embrace that column. I just put my arms around it to hold it and hug it. As I did that, the column vanished, and I fell forward and hit my head against the wall of the bedroom.

This was quite unusual for me, to have this kind of hallucination. As I was going home that night, I was thinking about it. I put it together to suggest that I had created Zen as this external great authority. I thought Zen was this monumental, wonderful, perfect religion that was "out there." When it all fell away, I realized that there was no Zen out there. It was all about the practice here within myself. That became a very significant turning point for me to really start showing up here for me.

I was living in a garage at that point. I had started sitting Zen meditation again when I went back to college because I was suffering, and I thought that Zen practice would somehow end my suffering. Somehow, a certain surface layer of that suffering did settle. I got calm and quiet. Then I continued meditating even though the initial reason for doing it had stopped. I thought this was very strange, because I'm a rational person and I want to have reasons for things. But I kept meditating anyway.

I kept wondering, "Why am I doing this?" Then one day I understood something very significant: I was sitting as a form of self-expression. It was the way an artist would express themselves on a canvas, or a dancer in dance, or a musician in making music. It was a deep inner expression. I didn't call it creativity. I just called it an inner expression that came flowing out of me, that was me, and that felt right. I discovered that here inside is where something really valuable is, where something can flow out of me like a spring that just felt so right and so complete in a certain way.

Even though my mind kept thinking, I didn't have any idea when I was doing Zen meditation that I was supposed to stop thinking. I was just supposed to be fully present with the moment, practicing unconditional acceptance of the moment as it is. Somehow that led me, sitting and meditating every day in the garage, to feel the rightness of just being present for this inner expressivity.

I went to San Francisco in 1978. I rented an apartment near the Zen Center. It was a dangerous area, a high-crime zone. I had three or four housemates, all of whom were robbed at gunpoint or knifepoint in the area. I was spared that particular challenge, though I think once I was able to duck out of the way of it.

Even with that, when I look back at 1978 and '79 in San Francisco compared to now, I didn't think about it then at all. I've been back to those same streets almost 50 years later, and they're so busy. There is so much activity and so much traffic. There was so much less traffic back then. In comparison, it was a quiet, peaceful place. I think that somehow affected me in doing my Zen practice, taking me into a different time—a peacefulness, a quieter, calmer time. I realize now that I was very much affected by the environment, just like many of us are affected by the more complicated, busy, hectic world we live in now. I'm glad I had that conditioning before living in the present moment.

At some point, I did my first seven-day Zen retreat. That was at the Green Gulch Zen Center, which had a farm in Marin County called Green Gulch Farm. I did my retreat there, saw that it was a farm, and thought, "I want to live here." And so I went to live there.

Looking back at that time, I think one of the very important experiences of living at this farm was the very simple lifestyle we had. I'd get up in the morning to meditate, have breakfast, go work in the fields, have lunch, go work in the fields again, have a break in the afternoon to shower and rest a little bit, have dinner, and then meditate some more. That was the rhythm of the day. On the weekend, there was some time off and I'd go walking in the hills.

There was no television. I stopped watching television in 1972 and I really haven't watched it since. Because of not watching TV, for my entire adult life I've been somewhat disconnected from popular culture. There was no TV at Green Gulch, and there were hardly any newspapers. There was a library if you wanted to read. There weren't a lot of activities. There were no cell phones, no internet, and no computers.

Compared to now, life was very subtle and simple. Settle into this very simple routine of meditating and working, meditating and working, alongside wonderful physical work outside, was phenomenally meaningful and important for me. Something inside of me relaxed, settled, and dropped away. I carried that with me into the meditation. When I sat down to meditate, it was very simple. I was just right there, very peaceful.

I remember one day sitting there unselfconsciously and taking in this new peaceful, quiet, settled, embodied way of meditating with my breathing. There was no self-consciousness, no trying to accomplish or attain anything. It was a wonderful means by which to settle more and more. It's a paradox that when we stop trying to settle and get concentrated, sometimes that's when it's easier to do so.

I remember at some point, my breathing—from all ways of experiencing it—stopped completely. I was unselfconscious about it and was hardly aware of it happening. But then suddenly I became aware I wasn't breathing, and I gasped for breath and said to myself silently, "I'm going to die." I got all agitated. Some meditators have this somewhat common experience of the breath getting quiet enough that they become afraid they aren't going to live. Over time, I learned that you can live quite fine in very peaceful meditation without any evidence of breathing. Whether there's some subtle breathing going on or an exchange of oxygen in other ways, I don't know, but it seems to be just fine.

I lived there at Green Gulch, but I was actually slated to go to graduate school. I had arrived there in April and was supposed to start graduate school at UC Berkeley in the fall to study soil science, a continuation of my agricultural interests. I wasn't paying much attention to it, but a couple of weeks before school was going to start, I still hadn't gotten an apartment in Berkeley or anyplace to live.

I went to do the afternoon ritual, the chant of the Heart Sutra^[1] that they do at lunch at the Zen Center. There was almost no one there, but I went because I was in shock. "Wow," I thought. "Oh no, I need to do something, figure out what I'm doing here. Am I going to graduate school or not?"

In the middle of chanting the Heart Sutra, there was a sudden shift in my body. Something welled up—I don't know if it was like an explosion, but just boom. There was a deep knowing that I was not going to go to college; I was going to go to the Zen monastery, Tassajara.

I wrote to UC Berkeley, explained that something important had come up, and asked if I could delay my start for a year. They said sure. So I finished the fall at Green Gulch, and then in January, I went to the Zen Center monastery deep in the Los Padres National Wilderness. It was a wonderful monastery where I lived and practiced for almost the next three years.

I'll continue some of these stories tomorrow. I think it's going slower than I anticipated, so I guess I'm not going to get to any conclusion this week. Thank you.