Zen

   One of the problems addressed by Zen is that of having an experience.  People talk about trying to learn the meaning of life.  Life has no meaning.  What’s the meaning of a flower?  What we are looking for is an experience of life, getting the experience.  But we’re shoving ourselves off the experience by naming, translating, and classifying every experience that comes to us.  You fall in love.  O.K., is this going to lead to marriage or is this illicit or whatnot.  You’ve classified and lost the experience.  So, put your head in the lion’s mouth and just say, “I don’t know what the hell is going on.”  And something will come of it.  TMTT 205

I had a very strange experience when I was invited to lecture at a seminary in Long Island where priests are trained.  The priest who wrote and invited me said he was very eager to have me come because I had in my writings introduced him to the inward life.  So I go there and find these men studying Zen.  I was stunned because I was brought up a Catholic and I would have received nothing like this kind of reception forty years ago.  Meditation has to do with finding the Christ in you, finding the energy in you.  Well, that is what sitting zazen is all about, too: realizing one’s own Buddha nature.   G19