my expanding awareness of spiritual dimensions. I was intent on learning this.
While following a monastic lifestyle, for the first time I felt at home in this world. For the first time I felt I could live out my private life and my innermost longings. Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, nestled in the mountains behind Big Sur in California, was also the first place I met a group of people my age like myself. I could sense the longing they had, which matched my own: We all wanted to return to who we were in essence, to liberate ourselves from the attitudes and concepts of the collective society around us. We were all trying to get away from the deep pain we had seen in our parents and other relatives, and experienced through their stories of World War II or their personal lives of depression and alcoholism. We were all dedicated to finding a way to live on this planet that would not generate war and depression.
We rose at 4:30 a.m. for morning meditation. We went down to the meditation hall, an all-stone building with no heat. It was below freezing most mornings. We sat on our meditation cushions in long rows, facing the wall. We sat for forty minutes, trying to remain totally still to improve our concentration, to align with our will to stop all suffering. Several times during the day we repeated this vow:
Sentient beings are countless
I vow to save them all.
Tormenting passions are innumerable—
I vow to uproot them all.
The gates of the Dharma* are manifold—
I vow to pass through them all.
The Buddha's way is peerless--
I vow to realize it.
(*Levels of truth.)
We were practicing an Eastern form of meditation based upon the teachings of the Buddha. Although most of us at Tassajara had grown up in Christian or Jewish families, none of us had found satisfactory ways in our churches or synagogues that offered direct access to the experience of Truth.
After forty minutes, we had a walking meditation for five minutes, then sat again for forty. This was followed by a study period in the dining hall, then a return to the meditation hall for twenty minutes of chanting and breakfast in silence. The day proceeded ritually, with work, meditation before lunch, chanting, lunch as a meditation in a ritual form, a short break, work, bath, chanting before dinner, dinner in ritual form, a break, then either a lecture or meditation. This was the measure of our days. I was twenty-one years old at the time.
In order to have the privilege of joining this life, I was asked to show my commitment in the traditional way. I was to sit continuously for five days, rising from my meditation only for chanting and meals, a bathroom break, or to sleep at the scheduled time at night. During these five days, through the chill of the morning and the 90° heat of the afternoon, the flies crawling over my lips, the devastating aching in my knees, I reached the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. My feelings covered all the territory: anger, rage, sadness, helplessness, power, joy, hysteria, peace, love, gratitude, longing, satisfaction, fear, courage, willfulness, surrender, excitement, boredom, endurance, ease. I would never be able to blame another person for giving me these feelings—they were all within me, just waiting to burst out in some unpredictable rhythm.
Accompanying this roller coaster of feeling were body sensations that were wholly new to me. As I relaxed deeper into my experience of my true self, the tensions that had held me captive as I tried to fit the mold of who I should be to fit into the collective world began to release. Suddenly my body would begin to shake, as if my spine were a whip in the hand of some invisible force. I would bounce and shake as if I were astride a wild bull. Afterward I would feel a calm, a sense of being more whole and closer to my essence. Somehow my body knew how to shake me in order to return me to who I was, to unbind me from the rigid conditioning that had confined my body as well as my thoughts and my feelings.
So the five-day meditation was one of the greatest gifts I had ever received. It taught me that my own body was a guide to my essential self. It taught me that I am not only a sensitive receiver, responding to the stimulation of others, but an organism looking for ways to express itself. The meditation helped me to study the action of my inner life, which seemed to move from high drama to undisturbed quiet, notwithstanding that no "thing" was happening to me; I was just sitting there.
One of the other gifts I received during my time at Tassajara was the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a wise old man. When Lama Govinda arrived for a visit, I had no doubt that he personified wisdom and compassion; he had the regal quality of someone who had attained those human virtues and carried them gracefully. When he stepped out of the car, he put on his maroon mitred Lama's hat. He wore a matching long maroon robe. His white beard gently fell to the top of his chest. His face was lined with the deep marks of age. His eyes bestowed a depth I had never seen in a human being. In them were the worlds I longed for and identified with. In them were his travels to Tibet, his training as a Lama, his research as a scholar, his isolated hours as a writer. I was lucky enough to be chosen to attend him and his wife during their stay.
Through Lama Govinda, Suzuki Roshi, and the other teachers who came to stay at Tassajara, I realized that wisdom and compassion could be manifest in the world today, in this technological wasteland where people hardly meet, much less commune with each other. I no longer tried to think of questions to ask my teachers to show I was not crazy or to demonstrate how smart I was. I knew that my task now was to sit, to focus, and to do my work, and I could trust my own inner process to enlighten me.
Again, I was fortunate. I was in contact with a community of people who gave me their friendship and their support. Our mutual companionship shielded us from the devastating loneliness that is often part of the path toward wholeness. The Buddhist texts we were reading gave us a conceptual framework within which to place our experiences. The simple tasks—keeping warm, cooking, gardening, and building in a natural environment—helped keep us grounded in the physical world.
Still, it was not always easy to gracefully interweave the ordinary and extraordinary worlds.
Some of the phenomena that monastic life utilized to teach me about the nature of existence were astonishing. One early morning, during study period, one of the more verbal monks stood up to talk to the group. I looked up at him, and suddenly saw right through him. Literally—as if his cells had dispersed into thin air. I could see the table and chair and the wall behind him. No vestige of him remained. Then, within a few seconds, he again appeared in my field of vision. I could no longer see behind him. This made me realize the power of the mind to create a consensual reality and move beyond it! Plato was correct. We live in darkness in our ordinary consciousness. If we are fortunate enough to find some true light at all, we can see, only briefly, a reflection of the real truth.
Sometimes my experiences were frightening. One night after evening meditation, I was walking alone up the valley a short way from my cabin. Suddenly, I sensed what I can only call the roar of the universe. I heard it not with my normal hearing, but inside my head, to the point where I felt deafened in every cell of my body. Dimensions of sound that I had never heard before pressed in on me as if my whole body were an eardrum. I was terrified. I felt very alone and small. Words cannot describe this experience. There was no place to turn to for protection except the comfort of a friend's touch. Yet I knew human companionship was no real match for the overwhelming experience pressing in on me. I knew I would have to face this monster by myself. At that time I could not imagine what I would have to become to conquer it, but I knew I would need help to strengthen myself.
Intent on coming to terms with the Pandora's box of my inner world, I also sought explosive techniques of expanding my consciousness. After nine months of being at the monastery, when I was living in San Francisco
